Encontro de Energia no Meio Rural
AGRENER

Abstract

BINOTTI, C. S. and CORTEZ, L. A. B. Verificação da eficiência do sistema de refrigeração para aumentar a vida útil dos produtos. In Proceedings of the 3. Encontro de Energia no Meio Rural, 2000, Campinas (SP, Brazil) [online]. 2003 [cited 04 May 2024]. Available from: <http://www.proceedings.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=MSC0000000022000000100013&lng=en&nrm=iso> .

The strawberry (Fragaria x ananassa Duch.) fast cooling, is a determinative factor to draw out the shelf life of this product. This research work reports the strawberry fast cooling with forced air two hours after it was harvested. The product was cooled at 0ºC until they reached 7/8 cooling time. After it, the product was kept in the cold chamber for storage, with the same temperature, in order to verify its shelf life in terms of texture. A data acquisition system was used to record the fruit center temperature using a type "T" thermocouple. To verify the fruit quality loss, a Magness-Taylor device was used to determine the texture index. For that, an experiment was carry out using ten strawberries which were submitted to a 20% compress force of a 50N load cell for two weeks, with intervals of two days between the measurements. The variance analysis showed that there is no significant difference on the firmness loss during the storage time. Therefore, the strawberry cooling kept its texture during the storage period, increased in three times its shelf life and decreased its senescence.

Keywords : Air-forced; strawberry; texture.