Contract research project on effect of hydrocooling on the shelf life and quality of some summer vegetables of Bangladesh

Abstract

Experiments were conducted to find out the effect of hydro-cooling on the shelf life and quality of four summer vegetables viz. bittergourd, snake gourd, ash gourd and string bean from May 2000 to December 2000. The site of the hydro-cooling experiment was at the Rural Development Programme campus of Bangladesh rural Advancement Committee, Chandina. There were five treatments of temperature such as 150C, 100C, 50C, 20C and control. The hydro-cooling of vegetables was done by immersing the vegetables into a steel tank with stirred ice-cooled water. Hydro-cooled Vegetables were stored in BADC's Fish &Vegetable cool store at Dhaka airport premises,which maintained a temperature of 50C and RH50-60%. Cool chain was maintained all though upto the storage. Data were collected during storage of all vegetables on five quality parameters such as weight, colour,, firmness, shriveling and disease infection. except weight, data in respect of all other parameters were collected through organo leptic test method. It was observed that all four types of vegetables under control treatment started deteriorating from the 2nd to 4th day of storing and on the 10th day those got rotten and as such discarded. So, for convenience of comparison among the data obtained against all other hydro-cooling treatments with the control treatment storage period upto 10th day was marked up for analysis of quality performance during storage