ABSTRACT
Introduction ........................................................................................................ 531
Materials and Methods ..................................................................................... 532
Results and Discussion ..................................................................................... 532
Conclusions......................................................................................................... 534
Acknowledgments ............................................................................................. 535
References ........................................................................................................... 535
Production of mushrooms is commercially and economically important and
P. ostreatus is one of the most widely produced mushrooms (Chang, 1991).
However, there are few drying studies that report parameters such as the
effective coefficient diffusion and mass transfer coefficients for convective
drying of this material. There is also little information about drying periods,
which may be of importance in the design and operation of drying
equipments. The quality aspects of the products have been studied
independently of the drying engineering operation (Chua et al., 2000).
However, drying with tempering cycles represents an alternative that may
have certain advantages over conventional convective drying. Some of these
advantages are: less energy consumption, less thermal damage to the
product, and improved quality properties including homogeneity of the
product. The objectives of this work were to compare conventional air
drying and drying with tempering and to evaluate quality by means of color
comparison of the products.
