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Investigations were conducted on the encapsulation of the essential oils of and using gumArabic as an encapsulating agent. The essential oils of these plant materials were extracted using hydro-distillation method. The essential oil yield for was 2.40% while that of was 2.90%. The prepared gum Arabic was used to encapsulate the essential oils of the said plant materials ( and ) at an optimum in-feed concentration and to achieve maximum essential oil (flavour) retention during spray-drying. The gumArabic provided ideal viscosity for the infeed mixtures. The spray-dried samples were analysed for total encapsulated oil, surface oil and moisture content. The moisture content, total oil and surface oil for were 3%, 80% and 5% while for the values were 2.5%, 80% and 4% respectively. Prior to the encapsulation of the essentials, the physico-chemical properties of the oils were evaluated, namely: percentage non-volatile residue, specific gravity, refractive index, acid value, ester value, saponification value and solubility in70% ethanol and the results were: 0.89, 0.8860, 1.4810, 8.20, 82.25, 140.02 and 1:5 clearly soluble respectively for and 1.21, 0.9021, 1.4950, 9.64, 75.32, 118.64 and 1:5 clearly respectively for . The two essential oil samples were well retained in the gum Arabic encapsulation matrices. Keywords: Monodora, African nutmeg, essential oil, Black Pepper, Piper nigrum, flavour encapsulation. |
