The Food Research Lab mimics commercial food and beverage giants and formulates food, snacks, flavoured beverages, chews, gummies, etc. “You name it, we make it.”

Today’s Task

What We did Today?

Instant Tomato Chutney Powder 

Event: Today, I had a planned to work on instant tomato chutney powder

How I felt it (initially before executing the actual task): I always love to handle any project that comes with product formulation with innovation

Actual Task: Product formulation

What did I learn?

Tomato chutney contains ingredients like tomato, garlic, curry leaves, salt, cold–pressed mustard oil, green chillies, mustard seeds, cumin seeds, and whole red chilli. The challenging part with chutney powder was the retention of aroma and a sauce–like consistency. According to studies conducted by Lelise Tilahun Dufera et al., tomatoes were pretreated with different agents and dried at 50oC. It was concluded that better results were obtained by treating the tomatoes with 0.5% ascorbic acid. Based on that, today’s trial was planned with an alternative drying method of using a hot air oven with pre-treatment of tomato with 0.5% ascorbic acid at 50oC. The experimental result showed that dried tomato slices pretreated with 0.5% ascorbic acid gave the best retention of the natural colour and aroma of tomato and had excellent textural properties.