Encontro de Energia no Meio Rural
AGRENER

Resumo

ANTONIALI, Silvia e CORTEZ, Luís Augusto Barbosa. Resfriamento rápido com ar forçado para conservação pós-colheita de alface "crespa".. In Anais do 3. Encontro de Energia no Meio Rural, 2000, Campinas (SP, Brasil) [online]. 2003 [citado 02 Maio 2024]. Disponível em: <http://www.proceedings.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=MSC0000000022000000100010&lng=pt&nrm=iso> .

Temperature is an important environmental factor that affects directly the vegetable physiological processes. Cooling is the first step to follow in order to increase shelf life and reduce product loss at commercialization. The faster the field heat of vegetables is removed, the better the postharvest conservation process will be. In this case, the use of plastic films and plastic packages is necessary. The goal of this research was to evaluate the use of forced air precooling as a postharvest technology to maintain quality, increase the lettuce shelf life and reduce its losses. In the experiment it was used the crisped lettuce, 2 types of plastic box, 3 types of plastic film and the forced air precooling with 3 different air speeds. The product was evaluated considering the cooling time in the 3 air speeds studied, the weight loss during the forced air precooling process and during storage and general sensorial parameters. The velocity 1.24 m.s^-1 yielded a precooling time of 1 hour and 25 minutes and the velocity 0.83 m.s^-1 resulted in a precooling time of 1 hour and 29 minutes. The control sample took 28 hours and 23 minutes to reach the ⁷/₈ cooling time temperature. The precooled lettuce had 23 days of shelf life while the lettuce cooled with room cooling was kept in acceptable commercial conditions for 16 days. It was concluded that forced air precooling is an alternative for lettuce postharvest conservation and the combination of plastic box and plastic film can reduce product loss, maintaining its quality, increasing shelf life.

Palavras-chave : Alface; resfriamento rápido; ar forçado; conservação; pós-colheita.