Effect of high pressure high temperature processing on the volatile fraction of differently coloured carrots

To get deeper insight into the effect of high pressure high temperature (HPHT) processing on the volatile fraction of carrots, differently coloured cultivars exhibiting orange, purple, red and yellow hues were investigated. The impact of HPHT sterilisation was compared with thermal sterilisation based on equivalent microbiological inactivation. The results of this study demonstrated HPHT sterilisation to exert a distinct effect on important chemical reactions in comparison to thermal sterilisation. A comprehensive integration of MS-based metabolomic fingerprinting (HS-SPME–GC–MS) and chemometric tools has been implemented as an untargeted multivariate screening tool to identify differences. In all carrot cultivars, two dominant discriminative quality-related reactions were found: oxidative degradation and the Maillard reaction. Regarding the first reaction, oxidative terpenes, free fatty acids and carotenoids degradation products were detected at higher levels after HPHT sterilisation. Regarding the latter reaction, HPHT sterilisation appeared to suppress the formation of Maillard and Strecker degradation products.