QUALIDADE DA FARINHA PRODUZIDA DA GUEROBA DO CERRADO EM DIFERENTES CONDIÇÕES DE SECAGEM

Abstract

The Gueroba do Cerrado (Syagrus oleracea (Mart.) Becc.) is a monocotyledonous species belonging to the Arecaceae family, native in the Brazilian Cerrado. It is considered the only palm tree that produces bitter palm among the species commercially exploited in Brazil and its cultivation has reached space in Goiás agriculture, as it has great potential to produce quality palm hearts. With an increase in food production, a greater generation of waste is also identified, in this way, several studies are being carried out to create solutions to reduce or eliminate the environmental problems generated by the food agroindustry. Among the food preservation methods is drying to reduce deterioration, loss of nutritional and commercial value of the product. In this way, the objective of this work was to produce the flour of gueroba palm tree from the dried stem under different drying conditions, to analyze the drying kinetics and adjust mathematical models, as well as carry out the nutritional characterization. The methodology started by drying the gueroba stem in an oven at temperatures of 40, 50, 60 and 70 °C. After this process, physical chemical analyzes were carried out, such as water content, crude protein, lipids, ash, carbohydrates, energy value, pH, total soluble solids, titratable acidity, determination of color and absorption indices and water solubility indices. The results of this study showed that increasing the drying temperature reduces the drying time from 14.00 to 7.17 h at drying temperatures of 40 and 70°C. The Midilli model showed the best experimental fit to the drying data for temperatures of 40, 50 and 60 °C and the Wang and Singh model fit best for the temperature of 70 °C. The effective diffusion coefficients showed magnitudes of 2.146 x 10-11; 2.892 x 10-11; 3.459 x 10-11 and 5.592 x 10-11 and in the Arrhenius equation its activation energy was 27.159 kJ mol-1. The drying of gueroba stem favors the reduction of the initial water content, lipids, energy value, pH, SS and IAA and the IAS and AT analyzes showed opposite behavior. Drying did not alter the protein, ash, carbohydrates contents and modified the color of the flours in the L*, a* parameters and maintained the pattern for the b* coordinate. The flour from gueroba stem from the cerrado has the potential to enrich foods or even partially replace another type of flour, by using it as a substrate for production of several other products, since it is low in calories and rich in potassium, helping to keep the blood pressure, in addition to combating fluid retention.