Some applications to retain the quality of fruits and vegetables during drying and storage in Turkey

Drying process is very important preservative method for foods and usually brings about some degradation of the final products. For this reason, some handlings such as pretreatments (physical, thermal, chemical etc.) are generally required to preserve the product quality either during drying or storage. One of the most important exporting stuff of Turkey is dried fruits and vegetables and the most acceptable dried grape (raisin), apricot, fig, tomato, hazelnuts over the world are produced in Turkey. In this article, some traditional and commercial applications to decrease quality losses during drying and storage of fruits and vegetables in Turkey and some constraints about these applications were explained and discussed. In addition to these applications, some results of recent researches performed in Turkey to keep the quality of dried fruits and vegetables and decrease the activity of molds and yeasts were explained. © 2015, Japan Society for Food Engineering. All rights reserved.