Adoption of a vacuum drying technology for vanilla beans.

Abstract

This report contains work for a development project of adoption of vacuum drying technology vanilla beans. Vanilla beans are harvested when they are green and flavorless. This is because the botany of vanilla beans revealed that the flavor precursors are found in the interior of the vanilla bean and hydrolytic/degradative enzymes that catalyse the flavor precursors into flavor compounds are on the outer surface layer. So it's during the curing process when the vanilla beans develop the aroma. The curing process has four major stages that is killing which to disorganize the bean tissue, such that contact created between the substrate the respective The second process is sweating this is to provide for enzyme catalysed production of flavor compounds and also non-enzymatic reactions. Then drying and conditioning all explained in chapter two (literature review). During the sweating content of vanilla increase to 60-70% and this makes it necessary for during as the next stage. Drying of vanilla beans is a difficult stage due to different factors and this stage is apparently critical to the prevention of flavor quality, because prolonged drying may lead to loss in content. The problem associated with the current method of drying vanilla are discussed in both chapter one and chapter two, also in chapter two the curing, process and different methods of drying and different types of dryers are discussed. Chapter three explains the methodology of constructing vacuum dryer for vanilla beans which can mitigate the problems in the problem statement and chapter four has results and discussions which give a clear evidence that dying under Vacuum reduces the drying time as compared to using a traditional method of sun drying. The vacuum dryer was designed, constructed and tested and the recommendations were to further study on automation of the equipment which will be a great advantage for drying.