Effect of Different Methods of Drying on Appearance and Quality of Black Pepper

Black pepper is also known as black gold, since this has been traded like gold during the dawn of colonialization. The produce fetches higher price in the market based on its colour, lustre as well as bulk density. Sun-drying is the common method of drying, and due to direct exposure to sunlight, characteristic shiny black colour is deteriorated. Blanching is one of the techniques to retain the colour of dried produce. But this process is time-consuming and requires extra labour and large amount of firewood. In order to find an alternative easier method to retain black colour of berries without affecting the quality parameters, an experiment was conducted with 7 treatments, viz. direct sun-drying, hot water blanching for 1 min, hot water blanching for 2 min, covering with 100- and 300-gauge polythene sheets for 3 and 5 h. Among the different treatments, covering the berries with 100-gauge polythene sheet for 3 or 5 h and subsequent drying under direct sunlight not only retained black colour of dried produce with higher dry recovery (39.31 and 39.39%, respectively) but also did not alter the quality parameters, viz. essential oil (EO) content (2.64 and 2.56%, respectively) and oleoresin content (6.75 and 6.45%, respectively) as compared to conventional sun-drying where the dry recovery percentage was 37.98% with 2.69% of essential oil and 6.96% of oleoresin content.