Traducere Back Engl Carrots.docx

Vegetables are an important component of human diet. They are plants or parts of plants that are used as food. Vegetables are important in improving meal acceptance, because of varied colors, flavours and textures that they contribute with. The recommended minimum vegetable intake is of 284 g per person, or 20 per cent of the total food necessary for an adult, for vegetarians being much higher. Drying is one of the most relevant and challenging operations, considering a large number of food products undergo at least one drying operation over the course of the entire production process. Dehydration or drying of food is described as a procedure that involves the removal of volatile substances in the presence of temperature with the goal of obtaining a dried solid. The main goals of drying cultures are prolonging shelf life, improving quality, simplifying handling, storage and transport and also preparing the product for further processes. Being seasonal, while also very perishable due to their high moisture content, carrots are available in abundence only at a certain time of the year. During peak season due to an abundance of carrots, their price drops considerably, resulting in major losses for producers. To store carrots over a long period of time to be available for use out of season, dehydration is one of the most important methods because it lowers the cost of packaging, storage and transportation, managing to reduce both the weight and the volume of the finite product. The carrot (Daucus carota) is an important vegetable that has a high utility and nutritional value. The carrot belongs to the Umbelli ferae family, genus Daucus, species Carota, and is one of the root vegetables that are cultivated in the entire world for its edible fleshy pulp. Being a cold season root vegetable, it is cultivated extensively in various countries, and particularly during winter in tropical regions. Many applications can be found in day to day usage such as extracting carrot juice, powdered carrot, carrot flavoured sweets, soups, carrot flakes used in stews, etc. [Gisslen, Wayne (2010). Professional Cooking, College Version. John Wiley & Sons. p. 146. ]Carrots are known for their nutritional content consisting primarly in caroten and carotenoids, along side appreciable measures of vitamins B1,B2,B6,B12 and minerals. As such carrots occupy an important position in root vegetables for their varied applications, which result is developing diverse processing operations for obtaining different products and to also extend its shelf life. Fresh carrots can not be stored for more than 3-4 days under normal conditions, but its shelf life can be prolonged up to 7-8 months if stored in crates covered in perforated plastic sheet at a temperature of 0⁰C an relative humidity of 93-96 per cent .

The AOAC method can be used for analyisi, but in our case, the method used was thermogravimetric analysis using a the sartorius scale MA-50