Assessment of nutritional and microbial quality of dragon-aonla blended fruit spread

Dragon fruit is highly nutritious but hasn’t been widely accepted by consumers due to its poor taste. Its taste can be improved through value addition and thus dragon fruit could become a common household item. Blending dragon fruit pulp with Aonla pulp presents an opportunity to create a balanced health product that is high in both sensory and nutritional quality. The present investigation was carried out to prepare fruit spread, a fruit confectionery prepared by combining sugar, pectin, and acid with blended pulp of dragon fruit and aonla fruit. The storage studies of mixed fruit spread packed in glass jar showed significant changes in physico-chemical properties during three months of storage. Total soluble solid, total sugars, reducing sugars and titratable acidity increased significantly from 60.00-61.39°B, 41.04-42.50%, 17.24-18.33% and 0.671-0.757%, respectively, while moisture, ash, phosphorus and iron content decreased significantly from 29.58-27.93%, 0.689-0.461%,13.85-13.43 mg/100g and 1.095-0.771 mg/100 g, respectively in blended fruit spread during storage. Ascorbic acid content was maximum (71.08 mg/100g) in blended spread containing 50%aonlapulp, while betacyanin content was maximum (15.45 mg/100g) in spread with 100%dragon fruit content. All the samples were under safe limits for three months of storage. The treatment containing 60% dragon fruit and 40% aonla fruit scored high colour, texture, taste, mouthfeel, and overall acceptability rating. The dragon and Aonla fruits possess good nutritional properties which could be utilized for the large scale production at industrial level.