Optimisation of Flour Composition Ratio, Baking Temperature and Time on Papaya Biscuit Production and Evaluation of Biscuit Stability during Storage

The underutilized papaya from agroindustry can cause adverse impact towards economy and environment. Papaya is a highly nutritious fruit however it is prone to decay and injury during storage. Thus, it is important to find solutions for this underutilised papaya. One of the solutions is to convert fresh papaya into papaya powder, and used as functional ingredient in food and beverage. The objectives of this study were to optimize the flour composition ratio, baking temperature and time for biscuit production, and evaluate the stability of physicochemical properties of optimized papaya biscuit during storage. The optimized condition with desirability of 0.537 produced biscuits with moisture content of 3.83 ± 0.08%, antioxidant activity of 85.95 ± 0.86%, hardness of 1256.33 ± 93.11 N, 43.52 ± 0.57 of L* value, 19.91 ± 0.27 of a* value, and 21.47 ± 0.63 of b* value. Flour composition ratio, baking temperature and time have significant impacts on the properties studied. Kinetic studies show that the optimized papaya biscuit was more stable during storage since the kinetic rate constants of the antioxidant, moisture content, hardness and color were lower than the control biscuit.