Local Processing Techniques Research Articles

Enhancing Indonesian Konnyaku Quality: A Process Optimization Approach

Konnyaku, a traditional Japanese food made from the porang tuber (Amorphophallus konjac), is known for its unique texture and health benefits. Despite its growing popularity, limited research has optimized the processing conditions for producing high-quality konnyaku, particularly regarding its physical and organoleptic properties. This study addresses this gap by investigating the effects of boiling temperature, boiling time, and water-to-porang (W/P) ratio on the hardness and sensory attributes (taste, color, and texture) of konnyaku. A factorial experimental design was used, and data were analyzed using Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The results showed that the optimal processing conditions for the highest sensory acceptance and hardness were a boiling temperature of 100°C, a boiling time of 30 minutes, and a W/P ratio of 1:4, yielding a hardness of 1788.26 g-force. All three factors significantly impacted the organoleptic properties, with distinct interactions observed between the parameters. This study provides critical insights for enhancing konnyaku production and contributes to the sustainable development of the porang industry by promoting efficient local processing techniques.

A benefit-cost analysis approach for determining the optimal processing of micronutrient-enriched cowpea leaf soup mixes

Cost-effective techniques are usually recommended in the dissemination and adoption of postharvest processing technologies of food products. Due to limited value addition practices for cowpea leaf, the Fruits and Vegetables for All Seasons Project undertook a study to bridge the gap in the seasonal availability of the vegetable in the arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) of Kenya through the production of cowpea leaf soup mix. However, the adoption of these techniques has an economic perspective that guides decision-making. This study utilized a two-stage linear programming methodology using NutriSurvey and the analytic hierarchy process in a seven-step hierarchy for the production of a cowpea leaf soup mix of an optimal nutrition and sensory quality. The optimal inclusion level of cowpea leaves into the soup mix was 49%. With an R2 of 61.36%, consistency, taste, and mouthfeel were the greatest determinants of the acceptability of cowpea leaf soup mixes. The incorporation of blanching in solar drying and sun drying were the least costly options with priority vectors of 0.08 and 0.09 (CR < 0.1) respectively, whereas, in the use of mechanized processing techniques such as oven drying, priority vectors of 0.10–0.19 had higher maximum benefits than the local processing technique of sun-drying that had a priority vector of 0.08 (CR < 0.1). The benefit-cost ratio was maximal without extrusion, with the solar-drying pathway having the highest benefit-cost ratio of 1.5. The study found that resource-intensive pathways yielded maximum benefits in the retention of quality. However, with the exclusion of extrusion, the benefit-cost ratio of the processes improved.

Culture matters: A systematic review of antioxidant potential of tree legumes in the semiarid region of Brazil and local processing techniques as a driver of bioaccessibility.

Ethnobotanical studies report that human populations from the Brazilian Caatinga biome use tree legumes (Fabaceae) with medicinal and food purposes. Our study provides a systematic review of the available published information concerning the antioxidant potential of Hymenaea courbaril L. (jatobá), Libidibia ferrea (Mart. Ex Tul.) L.P.Queiroz (jucá), and Dioclea grandiflora Mart. Ex Benth. (mucunã). Furthermore, in this paper, we infer the possible effects of local processing techniques applied to these plants on their antioxidant potential. In order to achieve these goals, we reviewed 52 articles, including studies from ethnobiology (n = 17), chemistry (n = 32), and food studies testing antioxidant activity (n = 17), excluding 14 repetitions. We found that these legume species can inhibit the formation of free radicals and this potential action varies among different parts of the plant. Probably, the presence of phenolic compounds such as phenolic acids and flavonoids, which are not uniformly distributed in the plants, explain their antioxidant activity. Local processing techniques (i.e., roasting, milling) affect the bioaccessibility of antioxidant components of tree legumes, inducing both positive and negative effects. However, studies about the antioxidant potential did not consider local processing techniques in their analyses. Our study highlights that culture is a fundamental driver of nutritional and pharmacological outcomes related to edible resources since it determines which parts of the plant people consume and how they prepare them. Hence, ignoring cultural variables in the analysis of antioxidant activity will produce inaccurate or wrong scientific conclusions.

Effect of Local Processing Techniques on the Nutrients and Anti-Nutrients Content of Bitter Cassava (<i>Manihot Esculenta Crantz</i>)

The effects of local processing techniques on the nutrients and anti-nutrients content of bitter cassava were investigated. Raw bitter cassava tubers were boiled to produce (Rogo), sundried to produce (chips), roasted to produce (roasted chips), fried to produce (Kuese), partially fermented and sun dried to produce (Elubo), fermented by submersion to produce (Akpu) and finally, fermented by solid state to produce (yellow and white Gari). All these locally processed cassava products were subjected to proximate, mineral and anti-nutrient analysis using standard methods. The result of the proximate showed that, raw bitter cassava is composed of 1.85% ash, 64.38% moisture, 4.11% crude fibre, 1.03% crude protein, 0.66% lipids and 30.88% total carbohydrate. Mineral analysis of the raw bitter cassava tuber contained 32.00mg/100g Calcium, 12.55mg/100g Magnesium, 1.38mg/100g Iron and 80.17mg/100g Phosphorous. Even though all processing techniques significantly expose more of the the mineral content, fermentation had highest effect. The anti-nutrients analysis showed that the raw peeled tuber contained 98.16mg/100g cyanide, 44.00mg/100g oxalate 304.20mg/100g phytate and 73.00mg/100g saponin. In general all the processing techniques showed a significant reduction of the phytate, oxalate and saponin content of the cassava. However, only fermentation, sun drying and garification were able to reduce the cyanide content of bitter cassava below the safe level (10mg/100g) recommended by Standard Organization of Nigeria. Yellow gari(with the addition of palm oil) showed low cyanide content (1.10 mg/100g) than white gari (3.51 mg/100g). This also emphasis that processing methods involving fermentation reduce cyanide and other anti-nutrients in the cassava to levels that are safe for consumption and should be widely practiced.

Bio-EdIP: An automatic approach for in vitro cell confluence images quantification

Cell imaging is a widely-employed technique to analyze multiple biological processes. Therefore, simple, accurate and quantitative tools are needed to understand cellular events. For this purpose, Bio-EdIP was developed as a user-friendly tool to quantify confluence levels using cell culture images. The proposed algorithm combines a pre-processing step with subsequent stages that involve local processing techniques and a morphological reconstruction-based segmentation algorithm. Segmentation performance was assessed in three constructed image sets, comparing F-measure scores and AUC values (ROC analysis) for Bio-EdIP, its previous version and TScratch. Furthermore, segmentation results were compared with published algorithms using eight public benchmarks. Bio-EdIP automatically segmented cell-free regions from images of in vitro cell culture. Based on mean F-measure scores and ROC analysis, Bio-EdIP conserved a high performance regardless of image characteristics of the constructed dataset, when compared with its previous version and TScratch. Although acquisition quality of the public dataset affected Bio-EdIP segmentation, performance was better in two out of eight public sets. Bio-EdIP is a user-friendly interface, which is useful for the automatic analysis of confluence levels and cell growth processes using in vitro cell culture images. Here, we also presented new manually annotated data for algorithms evaluation.

Natural variability and effect of processing techniques on raffinose family oligosaccharides in pigeonpea cultivars

High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was performed to determine the raffinose family oligosaccharides (RFOs) and sucrose content in 32 pigeonpea cultivars. The results showed that the RFOs in the pigeonpea seed extracts comprised of raffinose, stachyose and verbascose. The contents of raffinose, stachyose and verbascose were within the range of 1.15 to 2.55%, 2.25 to 4.05% and 2.05 to 4.05% with mean values of 1.63%, 2.97% and 2.80%, respectively. There was large level of variation of individual RFOs. Furthermore, to study the effect of post-harvest processing on the RFO contents, sprouting and cooking experiments were conducted with the seeds of the variety VBN 3 which possessed high RFO levels. Sprouting significantly reduced the RFO levels within 24 hours while cooking even up to 30 min in boiling water did not result in a considerable reduction. Among the local processing techniques, sprouting had significant effect on reducing RFOs content in pigeonpea.

Application of the windowed-Fourier-transform-based fringe analysis technique for investigating temperature and concentration fields in fluids.

The present work is concerned with the development and application of a novel fringe analysis technique based on the principles of the windowed-Fourier-transform (WFT) for the determination of temperature and concentration fields from interferometric images for a range of heat and mass transfer applications. Based on the extent of the noise level associated with the experimental data, the technique has been coupled with two different phase unwrapping methods: the Itoh algorithm and the quality guided phase unwrapping technique for phase extraction. In order to generate the experimental data, a range of experiments have been carried out which include cooling of a vertical flat plate in free convection conditions, combustion of mono-propellant flames, and growth of organic as well as inorganic crystals from their aqueous solutions. The flat plate and combustion experiments are modeled as heat transfer applications wherein the interest is to determine the whole-field temperature distribution. Aqueous-solution-based crystal growth experiments are performed to simulate the mass transfer phenomena and the interest is to determine the two-dimensional solute concentration field around the growing crystal. A Mach-Zehnder interferometer has been employed to record the path-integrated quantity of interest (temperature and/or concentration) in the form of interferometric images in the experiments. The potential of the WFT method has also been demonstrated on numerically simulated phase data for varying noise levels, and the accuracy in phase extraction have been quantified in terms of the root mean square errors. Three levels of noise, i.e., 0%, 10%, and 20% have been considered. Results of the present study show that the WFT technique allows an accurate extraction of phase values that can subsequently be converted into two-dimensional temperature and/or concentration distribution fields. Moreover, since WFT is a local processing technique, speckle patterns and the inherent noise in the interferometric data do not affect the resultant phase values. Brief comparisons of the accuracy of the WFT with other standard techniques such as conventional Fourier-filtering methods are also presented.

An Appraisal of Fish Processing and Handling in Yola North Local Government Area of Adamawa State the Question of Appropriate Technology

This study was carried out to ascertain the effectiveness of adopting sun-drying as an appropriate technology for the production of sun-dried fish. Field survey, processing operation and laboratory analyses were the research methods used. The field survey consisted of oral interviews and personal observations. The processing operation similar to the local processing technique but with some modifications. Laboratory analyses were carried out on both the locally processed and the “modified” processed fish. The analysis includes moisture content, microbial load, protein and fat contents, sensory evaluation and Thiobarbituric acid values. The personal observation from field survey showed that little or nor regards is given to the hygiene of the fish during processing and this resulted in the poor quality of the fish product. Low moisture content of between 4.5 – 6% was attained for the fish products within four days of drying, while 15%, 15.9% and 15.86% were obtained for the market samples. Washing, scaling, gutting and salting were observed to affect the microbial load of the fish samples. The microbial load (cfu) of 1.3 x 10 5 , 5 x 10 4 and 1.2 x 10 5 were observed for the market samples, while 1 x 10 3 , 3 x 10 3 and 9 x 10 3 was obtained for modified processed samples. Thiobabituric acid value of A528nm gave 1.482, 1.76 and 0.936 for market samples, while 0.70, 0.78 and 0.858 were obtained for modified processed samples. Sensory evaluation using Hedonic rating on a 7 point scale, the values of 4.17, 3.11 and 2.11 were obtained for market samples and 6.61, 5.61 and 5.28 for modified processed sample.

Calcium bioavailability of selected Egyptian foods with emphasis on the impact of fermentation and germination

The bioavailability of calcium (Ca) was assessed in 11 foodstuffs of plant or animal origin using rat feeding experiments and the criteria used for assessing the bioavailability were femur Ca and calcium efficiency. The bioavailability of Ca was found to be highest in fishes (Melouha) and cheeses (Mesh) fermented under local processing techniques. Germination of faba beans also enhanced the bioavailability of calcium to a mean value quite comparable to those of some dairy products, such as cottage cheese. The present study clearly demonstrates that the processes of fermentation and germination of selected foods are associated with an enhancement in the bioavailability of calcium. It is suggested that the breakdown of complex proteins under the fermentation or germination process is the underlying mechanism of action.

Speckle reduction in synthetic-aperture-radar imagery

Speckle appearing in synthetic-aperture-radar images degrades the information contained in these images. Speckle noise can be suppressed by adapted local processing techniques, permitting the definition of statistical parameters inside a small window centered on each pixel of the image. Two processing algorithms are examined; the first one uses the intensity as a variable, and the second one works on a homomorphic transformation of the image intensity. A statistical model for speckle noise that takes into account correlation in multilook imagery has been used to develop these processing algorithms. Several experimental results of processed Seasat-A syntheticaperture-radar images are discussed.