The Retention of Volatile Flavors in Food

Abstract

Volatile flavor compounds are often retained in the dried carbohydrates in quantities greaterthan expected on the basis of vapor pressure characteristics. In an effort to elucidate the mechanism of this phenomena, the retention of volatile compounds in the model system was studied. The systems consisted of quartic mixture of water, organic volatile, glycerol and carbohydrate. The volatile content after freeze-drying was measured gas-chromatographically by extracting the dried material with 0.5ml of absolute methanol and injecting a 1.0μl sample.The retention of volatiles was influenced by a number of factors, including the relative volatility of each volatile compound and its diffusion coefficient. Sucrose or maltose solution retained larger quantities of volatiles than the solution of polysaccharide. The volatiles retained were; 26-45% of ethyl-n-butyrate and 65-87% of alcohols in the quartic mixture. The observed volatile retentions indicated that the formations of micellar colloid and microregion for entrapping volatiles are much more important than the equilibrium of gas-liquid or diffusion consideration of the volatile.