THE EFFECTS OF GREEN TEA EXTRACT ADDITION ON THE ANTIOXIDANT ACTIVITY, PHYSICOCHEMICAL PROPERTIES AND SENSORIAL ACCEPTABILITY OF READY TO EAT JAPANESE CURRY

Abstract

Japanese curry is a popular dish which contains a high amount of spices, which provides the dish with quite a considerable amount of antioxidant activity. Even if curry may contain a high amount of spices, curry itself also contains a moderate amount of fat and oil which is involved in its production. Due to the moderate amount of fat and oil in curry, the product will be susceptible to auto-oxidation during storage which reduces its quality. Therefore, the objective of this experiment is to investigate the effects of adding green tea extract on the quality properties of the curry such as antioxidant activity, viscosity, pH and sensorial acceptability of the Japanese curry samples. The sensorial acceptability was measured through the preference and discriminative test. The results of this experiment showed that the addition of 1000 and 2000 ppm of green tea extract were effective in increasing the antioxidant activity of the samples starting from Day 3 of storage. While the addition of 500 ppm of green tea extract did not result in an increase in the antioxidant activity of the samples as its qualities were similar to the control even after Day 7 of storage. The findings of the sensory analysis suggests that there was no large difference in the sensorial acceptability of the samples and the panelists were not able to differentiate the samples with the control during the triangle test.