Preprocessing storage conditions for green 'Conservolea' and 'Chondrolia' table olives

Green olives (Olea europaea L. cvs. 'Conservolea' and 'Chondrolia'), destined for Spanish-style processing, were harvested at the beginning and the end of commercial harvest period and stored at 5 and 7.5 degreesC in air or various controlled atmospheres. Olive quality was measured periodically and included mass loss, skin color, flesh firmness and chilling injury symptoms, mainly internal browning. Larger samples of 'Conservolea' olives were commercially processed with the Spanish method after storage for objective quality determination and taste panel evaluation. Mass loss of fresh olives during storage was generally low and no fruit decay was encountered. Fresh 'Chondrolia' green olives were very sensitive to chilling injury. They lost their capacity to develop skin color and ripen after 2-4 weeks of cold storage with excessive internal browning, resulting in pitting and external discoloration. Fresh 'Conservolea' green olives developed skin color, especially at 7.5 degreesC, and after storage in air, 2 or 5 kPa CO2. Fruit stored at 2 kPa O-2 in the presence or not of high CO2 retained their green color for more than 2 months. 'Conservolea' olives slightly softened during storage but with longer storage, in parallel with chilling injury development, a rehardening of the fruit flesh was measured, possibly an additional chilling injury symptom. Storage at 5 degreesC and combinations of 2 kPa O-2 and 2 or 5 kPa CO, increased susceptibility to chilling injury, although fruit successfully retained skin green color. Objective and subjective quality evaluation of processed 'Conservolea' olives gave similar differences between treatments. Abnormal flavor seemed to be an additional result of chilling injury. In conclusion, `Conservolea' green olives can be stored up to 37 days at 5 degreesC in air or for up to 22 days at 7.5 degreesC and 2 kPa O-2 plus 5 kPa CO2. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

Characterisation of the geographical origin of Western Greek virgin olive oils based on instrumental and multivariate statistical analysis

In this work, measurements of free acidity, peroxide content, spectrophotometric parameters, chlorophyll content, phenols, sterols, fatty acids and triacylglycerol composition, were carried out on samples of virgin olive oils (VOOs) coming from four different Greek Ionian islands, i.e. Zakynthos, Kefalonia, Lefkada and Kerkyra. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) highlighted statistically significant differences (p<0.01) in the values of 26 analytical parameters among the VOOs produced in the four different geographical regions but a Post-Hoc test showed that no variable was able to distinguish all four origins. Analogously, a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) showed a modest grouping of VOOs according to geographical origin except for Kerkyra samples which were more distinct from others. Applying discriminant function analysis (DFA) a good separation of the four geographical groups was achieved with classification and prediction abilities equal to 97.7% and 95.3%, respectively. Moreover, the analysis of the standardized coefficients showed that the fatty acids and triacylglycerols were the most discriminant variables. This last outcome was confirmed by comparison of the prediction performances obtained applying DFA on four subdatasets containing fatty acids (69.8%), triacylglycerols (76.7%), sterols (62.8%), and remaining parameters (65.1%) together, respectively. As the results showed, the multidisciplinary approach that combines different types of analytical determinations improved the discrimination of geographical origin for Greek virgin olive oils