Int.J.Curr.Microbiol.App.Sci (2018) 7(6): 3198-3205 3198 Original Research Article https://doi.org/10.20546/ijcmas.2018.706.375 Study on Osmotic Dehydration of Fig Fruit (Ficus carica) Slices Mediated Tray Drying T. Niranjan * , G. Rajender, Praneeth Reddy, Vivek Reddy, Akhil Kumar and Vamshi Krishna Department of Processing and Food Engineering, College of Agricultural Engineering, Kandi, Sangareddy, Prof. Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University, Hyderabad, Telangana, India *Corresponding author ABSTRACT Introduction Fruits and vegetables are highly perishable commodities. These commodities have significant post-harvest losses. To avoid these losses and to preserve them for longer period, preservation techniques are to be employed. Preservation of fruits and vegetable can be done by various methods, among them; most significant technique is osmotic dehydration. Osmotic dehydration is a drying process for the partially removal of the water from the food material by immersing the food material in some concentrated solution like sucrose or salt solution through semi permeable membrane the removal of water from lower concentration of solute to higher concentration results in the equilibrium condition in both sides of membrane (Rastogi et al., 1997). The osmotic dehydration is not only remove the water by the pressure difference in the food material and the concentrated product but also prevent the fruit decolouration by enzyme oxidative browning (Contreras and Smyrl, 1981) and aroma, nutritional constituents and flavour compound are retained. Osmotic dehydration is a simple, economical and non- destructive process with least wastage of fruit International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 7 Number 06 (2018) Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas.com Fig fruit (Ficus carica) are the rich source of minerals, vitamins, and fiber. The moisture content of the ripen fig fruit is about 86 percent due to its high moisture content the fig fruit is readily prone to the attack of yeast and mould. In this study the fig fruit were cut in to slices and dehydrated by osmotic dehydration process. This process is preferred over others due to it is an energy intensive process with retention of initial fruit characteristics viz., aroma, texture, colour and nutritional composition. The fig fruits were cut into slices and soaked in sucrose solution of different concentrations 40°Brix, 50°Brix and 60°Brix at two different temperatures 40°C and 50°C. The slices were soaked for different time durations until the initial moisture content was reduced to 50%. Further it was subjected to tray drying at 60°C for 8hours and the final moisture content was brought to less than 5% (safe storage moisture content). In the sensory evaluation it was found that the product dried in the 40°Brix solution at 40°C is more acceptable. Keywords Fig fruit, Osmotic dehydration, Tray drying, Sucrose solution, osmotic solution, fruit slices Accepted: 22 May 2018 Available Online: 10 June 2018 Article Info