Effect of Different Jackfruit Puree Concentrations on the Mechanical Properties of Jackfruit Frozen Confection

Abstract

Jackfruit frozen confection has been mechanically characterised in situ by using compression tests. There are no available studies on the mechanical behaviour of jackfruit frozen confection.   The aim of this study is to identify the mechanical properties of jackfruit frozen confections formulated with different concentrations of jackfruit puree. In this study, the experimental analyses are conducted using a compression test device made from LEGO Mindstorms EV3. The portable device is placed inside a freezer to enable the measurements to be done in low temperatures (-20^oC). This is to overcome the limitation of an actual texture analyser which can only be operated at room temperature. The mechanical properties of jackfruit frozen confections at different jackfruit puree concentrations (10%, 20% and 30%) are obtained using the tester and analysed. The tests conducted are uniaxial compression, stress relaxation test and multi-step stress relaxation test. It has been observed that frozen confection with 20% jackfruit puree concentration (JF20) is able to withstand a higher force of compression (27.79kPa) compared to the ones with 10% (JF10) and 30% (JF30) concentrations, at 21.15kPa and 10.48kPa, respectively. For stress relaxation test, JF30 has the highest increasing stress for a strain of 0.05 to 0.2 but it decreases at a strain of 0.3 to 0.4. The results of the multi-step relaxation test on JF30 show agreement with the other two tests where the stress decays starting from the 3^rd step until the 5^th step of the test. This study provides information on the behaviour of jackfruit frozen confection when subjected to compression and stress that imitates the movement during consumption.