DRYING OF EGGPLANT (SOLANUM MELONGENA L) WITH FOOD DEHYDRATOR

• Main Author: Rahmawati, Hanna
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/75581
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

<p align="justify"> Eggplant is one of the types of vegetables that are popular among people from various backgrounds. In addition, eggplant is a healthy vegetable because it has a fairly complete nutritional content. However, eggplant is easily subject to physiological, chemical, and microbiological changes. Therefore, further processing is needed to prevent damage to the eggplant, namely by preserving the vegetables. One of the actions that can be done to preserve vegetables is by drying them. In this study, drying was carried out on eggplant using a food dehydrator. This is done as an alternative to traditional drying which takes a long time and is very dependent on the weather, and the cleanliness is not guaranteed. The research was conducted with variations in temperature 50-800C and variations in pre- treatment, namely without pre-treatment, blanching, and blanching with sulfitation, to determine the effect of temperature and pre-treatment on moisture content, texture, color, and rehydration ratio. The results show that drying eggplant with initial moisture content of 93- 95% can produce dried eggplant with moisture content of 7.08%-9.92% in drying duration of 3.5-8 hours. In addition, the research results show that the drying process with different temperatures can affect the moisture content, color, and rehydration ratio. However, these variables do not have a significant effect on the hardness of dried eggplant. Meanwhile, drying eggplant with different pre- treatments shows a significant difference in texture, color and rehydration ratio and does not have a significant effect on moisture content and hardness of eggplant. Evaluation of 5 mathematical models of drying kinetics shows that Page Model gives the best description of eggplant drying characteristics because it has the highest R2 value of 0.9985 and the lowest RMSE value of 0.0139. The optimal condition is at the variation of blanching pre-treatment followed by sulfitation process at drying temperature of 600 C.