Heat treatment and modified atmosphere storage in post-harvest Murcott Tangor

Abstract

The sensitivity of fruits and vegetables in a refrigerated environment is a major postharvest problem, causing chilling injury which decreases the value of this product. The 'Murcott' tangor fruit is very sensitive to prolonged exposure to low temperatures. Cold storage allows the marketing of this fruit in the off-season periods, but the damage caused by low temperatures affects the appearance, compromising quality. This project aims to use heat treatments, such as intermittent heating and thermal conditioning, and also the use of packaging (LDPE 0.10¼m) associated with the thermal conditioning in order to minimize the cold damage during refrigerated storage. To this propose, the fruit is stored at 1 ° C for periods of 15, 30, 45, and 60 days, and after each storage, the period will be exposed to room temperature (23 ° C) for 3 days to simulate commercialization. The parameters to be evaluated are chilling injury, rot percentage, weight loss, ascorbic acid, soluble solids (SS), titratable acidity (TA), ratio (SS / TA), juice percentage, respiratory rate, ethylene production, determination of the gas composition inside the package and coloring. (AU)