Potentiality of freeze-thaw treatment to produce soft textured aonla (Emblica officinalis) candies.

Aonla, due to its astringency, is converted into various processed products. Candy is the most popular of among them. Commercially available aonla candies in India are hard in texture. However, soft textured candies are preferred more over harder ones. Hence, study was undertaken to produce soft textured candies. Whole fruits and fruit segments were blanched in boiled water, frozen in domestic freezer for 12 h and thawed at room temperature (15-20 °C). Fresh, blanched, frozen and thawed samples were subjected to textural analysis. Some of the blanched and thawed segments were used to prepare candies and subjected to textural analysis. Results indicated that force-deformation behavior of all samples differed significantly. Fresh, blanched, thawed and frozen segments required 14.39, 0.84, 0.22 and 0.18 N force, respectively to compress them till 1 mm deformation. Similarly, peak force (5 mm deformation) was maximum in fresh segments (172.25 N) followed by blanched (8.77 N), frozen (1.06 N) and thawed (0.85 N). Peak force values for control and soft candies were 13.14 and 6.86 N, respectively. Based on results, it was found that freeze-thaw treatment significantly reduced the firmness of segments and produced soft textured candies.