Process‐product characteristics of tray‐dried Benincasa hispida

This article targets the optimality of process‐product characteristics associated to intermittent airflow‐assisted tray‐dried Benincasa hispida. Drying kinetics and statistical design approaches have been followed to target the desired characteristics for variation with drying temperature and time. The key responses considered were moisture content, vitamin C, and antioxidant activity along with evaluation of other proximate parameters at optimum drying conditions. Kinetics‐based analysis involved fitness of drying model, evaluation of moisture diffusivity and activation energy, variation of vitamin C and antioxidant activity with drying temperature and time. On the contrary, statistical design approach targets numerical optimization based on analysis of variance (ANOVA) and fitness of alternate models. Among both approaches, the later approach provided the best combination of process parameters. With high vitamin C content, Benincasa hispida has been evaluated to be a key ingredient for the development of various value added ready to cook/consume food product formulations. Practical applications Tray‐dried Benincasa hispida possessing high nutritional characteristics can be adopted as a key ingredient in the formulations of value added food products such as ready to eat and cook products. Further, given the recent promising efforts of bottle gourd pulp fiber and wheat based biscuit product development, similar efforts can be as well targeted to achieve biscuits and other snacks using dried komora powder. The carried out investigations in this work attempt to visualize upon the symphony associated with the statistical design and trial‐ and error‐based optimality of process variables. Such evaluation procedures can identify compatible vegetables for mixed food product development due to the identification of optimal process parameters and nutritional characteristics. Thereby, useful guidelines can be provided to promote food processing sector growth in the North‐East India.