Olive oil is highly appreciated due to its nutritional and organoleptic characteristics. Olive oils rich
in bioactive compounds can be obtained by optimizing the time and temperature of the malaxation
process. In this sense, this study aimed investigating the effect of the malaxation temperature (22
to 34°C) on the olive oil's physicochemical and sensory quality and, in more detail, on the phenolic
profile. So, virgin olive oils were produced (November 2018), using olives from cv. Cobrancosa.
Furthermore, the possibility of using an electronic tongue, i.e., a multisensor potentiometric
device, comprising non-specific lipid polymeric with cross-sensitivity sensor membranes, to
monitor the malaxation temperature influence on the olive oil's quality and phenolic composition,
was evaluated. For that, multivariate statistical tools were developed for discriminating the olive
oils according to the malaxation conditions as well as to predict some key quality parameters,
including the extinction coefficients (K232, K268 and |ΔK|), free acidity, oxidative stability, peroxide
value, bitterness index, total phenols, phenolic composition and gustatory-retronasal positive
attributes. The study aims to determine the best malaxation temperature as well as to assess the
versatility of the electronic tongue as a single-run, fast and cost-effective analytical device for olive
oils quality evaluation.This work was financially supported by Associate Laboratory LSRE-LCM - UID/EQU/50020/2019, strategic funding UID/BIO/04469/2019 -CEB and BioTecNorte operation (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000004), strategic project PEst-OE/AGR/UI0690/2014 -CIMO and by UID/QUI/50006/2019 funded by FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC) through national funds. I.M.G. Marx
would also like to acknowledge FCT/MCTES for the Ph.D. grant number SFRH/BD/137283/2018.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
