Osmotic Dehydration Of Yellow Melon Using Red Grape Juice Concentrate

The main objectives of this work were to study the effect of fruit ripening on the melon osmotic dehydration at reduced pressure and to model the mass transfer of moisture during melon dehydration with grape juice concentrate and sucrose solution. The ripening level had no relevant effect over the physical characteristics of the final product, with soluble solids, moisture and water activity without significant differences. Besides, the mass loss and solute gain parameters did not show significant differences, and only the solute gain had few variations. The process of the osmotic dehydration with grape juice concentrate was the most effective one, with higher dehydration and lowest solutes gain compared to the process carried out with sucrose solution. The water effective diffusivity calculated by the Fick's equation for the process conduced with grape juice was lower than the one obtained for the sucrose solution, according to different equilibrium moisture content calculated by Peleg's equation. The dehydrated melon with grape juice concentrate showed reduced water activity (similar to 0.92) and low moisture content (similar to 58%).36346847