نشریه پژوهش های علوم و صنایع غذایی ایران
سال سوم شماره 1 (پیاپی 5، نیمه اول سال 1386)

Pistachio processing is one of the ways to increase the value added of pistachio. Production of pistachio butter is for this purpose. Pistachio butter is a paste form product that contain mainly milled, roasted pistachio kernel with sugar. The aim of this investigation is to produce pistachio butter using sunflower and sesame pastes. For this purpose, pistachio butter was formulated using sunflower and sesame pastes in two levels (10 and 20%). Rheological and organoleptic tests (from flavor, texture and color point of view) performed on the end products. The results were statistically analyzed by completely randomized Design and comparison between the means via Duncan's range test (5% level). The result of organoleptic test showed that the treatments 1, 2, 3 and 6 had higher scores. On the basis of organoleptic test, nutrition value as well as price product, suitable pistachio butter treatment was treatment 6. This formula contains 10% sunflower paste and 10% sesame paste.

Pistachio nut is one of the most important export crops in Iran. For prevention of rancidity and to ensure good quality, pistachio must be harvested in a short time and be prepared for drying in 24h.The Ohadi variety of Iranian raw dry pistachio nuts was selected for the experiments. Instrumental hardness and Sensory characteristics of pistachio nuts such as: flavor, texture and total acceptance were measured in 3 types of packaging (normal air or %21 02, Vacuum and Oxygen Scavenger), 3 different temperatures (25,35 and 55) during 3 month storage.Results showed that the effect of temperature, time storage and interaction effects of packaging and temperature, packaging and time storage on instrumental hardness were significant (P

The greatest pistachio producer and exporter country in the word is Iran. In the last fifteen years, the average production of this commodity was 232000 tons per year, which it is almost 52.5% of the total world production. Fine processing, post processing and transporting of pistachio, have great effects on improving quality, applied value, physical properties and finally marketing of this product. In this study, various methods of pistachio processing in recent years have been carefully investigated and after that, new suitable and multipurpose machine for pistachio processing, have been designed. This new multipurpose machine has capability of adjustable skin removing, cleaning, drying, and feeding individual pistachio for sorting. Some of the advantages of this new machine are simple mechanism; avoid using any complex parts, capability of automation, simple usage, simple maintenance and finally low cost of the machine.

Pistachio is one of the most important horticultural products in Iran and its processing and packaging has main role for exportation. Drying is very important step in pistachio processing. In this step kernel moisture content is decreased to 4-6 percent (d.b.), which suitable for storage condition. Equilibrium moisture content (EMC) has important effect on drying time and kernel quality. In this research, pistachio moisture desorption isotherms were obtained at drying temperatures (45, 60, 75 and 90 ºC) for two varieties of split Iranian pistachio: Kalehghouchi and Fandoghi. For this purpose, static method and saturated salts were used. Data were evaluated by several isotherm models used for agricultural grains.The experimental results showed that for each variety, EMC values reduced by increasing temperature.At different temperatures, Smith model gave good fitness for the data compared to the other models. Increasing temperature caused to reduce mono layer moisture content in pistachio. Also in this research, regression equations were obtained for estimation of mono layer moisture content at 45- 90ºC for each variety.

Pistachio is one of the strategic products of our country, Iran, which takes a lot of time yearly to be processed, So doing scientific and applicable researches about it's power demand through the different process stages, can play an important role in power demand and expense decreases.Based on the achievements of researchers, pistachio peeling stage takes the highest amount of energy compared to other stages and due to the orientation of pistachio peeler development toward the corrosive cage types, in this study we have tried to calculate the power demand and focus on kinetic analysis and safety factor determination of a two-corrosive-cage pistachio peeler.According to the achieved results, this type of pistachio peeler has the maximum power demand of 41.8 KW and the 2.1 safety factor.

In order to predict moisture content of pistachio nuts (Akbari variety) using artificial neural network (ANN) method, experiments were performed at five drying air temperatures (ranging 40 to 80 oC) and four input air flow velocities (ranging from 0.5 to 2 m/s) with triplicates in a thin layer dryer. Initial moisture content of all samples were held at bout 30 % d.b. The data obtained from the experiments were transferred to artificial neural network(ANN) medium. In order to develop neural network firstly experimental data were randomly divided into three sets of training (70%), validating (10%) and testing 20% models. In order to develop ANN models, we used multilayer perception (MLP) with back-propagation with momentum algorithm. MLP models trained as two, three and four layers. The highest coefficient of determination (R2) and lowest mean squared error (MSE) were considered as the criterion for selecting the best network. The network having three layers with a topology of 3-8-5-1 had the best results in predicting the moisture content of pistachio nuts. This network has two hidden layers with 8 neurons in the first hidden layer and 5 neurons in the second hidden layer. For this network, R2 and MSE were 0.9989 and 4.2E-6, respectively. The methodology and results of this research can used/adapted for design the industrial dryer.