Assessment of the post-harvest quality and conservation of spring onions submitted to hydrocooling

Abstract

Spring onions are part of the Alliaceae family and is one of the most used and traded vegetables in the world, with an essentially seasoning nature. However, they present high perishability and susceptibility to water loss, which reduces the useful life of the product, both on shelves (benefit for the producer) and in refrigerators (benefit for the consumer). The hydrocooling method, which consists of the immersion of the product in a mixture of water and ice, is a good alternative for field heat removal and favouring the humidity of vegetable products, besides being associated to its sanitation process. Considering what has been said, this paper aimed to check the efficiency and the effects of hydrocooling on the post-harvest quality and conservation of spring onions, through analyses of quality parameters such as fresh mass loss, total soluble solids (TSS), pH, total titratable acidity (TTA), chlorophyll index, TSS/TTA ratio, respiration, darkening index, and biospeckle through the moment of inertia method, aiming to determine the best hydrocooling application time at 5 ºC. Hydrocooling showed efficient, mainly on the mass loss control and on the commercial visual aspects, with 10 minutes as the most indicated application time