Storage Life Prediction of Pickled White Ginger with Sugar and Vinegar according to Texture Evaluation

The Tongling white gingers are crisp and tender in texture, and the sweet and sour white gingers marinated with sugar and vinegar are local specialties. In pickling, its crisp texture easily softens and loses its commercial value. The changes of sensory quality and mastication index of sweet and sour white ginger under different storage temperature (25, 35, 45 and 55 ℃) were analyzed. According to the Arrhenius equation, a kinetic model was established between the mastication index and the storage time, and the mastication index was used as the index to establish the storage time prediction model. The results suggested that the overall sensory scores of sweet and sour white ginger decreased during storage, in which the crispness decreased, the tenacity increased, and the higher the storage temperature was, the faster the crispness of mastication decreased. At the storage temperature of 25～55 ℃, the mastication index decreased with the extension of storage time, and the higher the storage temperature was, the greater the mastication index decreased. And the obtained prediction model for the preservation time of sweet and sour white ginger was as follows: y=41.694 e^−0.024x (y was chewing index, x was storage time, R²=0.9913). The dynamic model of quality change of sweet and sour white ginger based on texture evaluation had high fitting accuracy (R²>0.95). According to the sensory scores, the end point of mastication index of sweet and sour white ginger was 100.9, and the relative error between the predicted value and the measured value of storage time was less than 6%. Thus, this model could be used to predict the storage time of sweet and sour white ginger based on texture indexes.