Investigating Physical and Visual Alterations of Oven-Dried Cabya (Piper retrofractum Vahl.)

Cabya (Piper retrofractum Vahl.), often locally known as cabe jamu, can be a potential source for medicine and functional food industries. Regarding its perishability, there is a need to develop postharvest handling for preserving cabya quality as an alternative to conventional drying. Proper postharvest handling of cabya is essential since the quality deterioration occurs rapidly after harvested. This research aimed to investigate physical (dimension, weight loss) changes of cabya dried in the oven-drying at 80 °C for 2, 4, and 6 h. For visual appearance, digital image analysis using ImageJ software was applied to quantify color changes expressed as RGB. We compared RGB profile of fresh (FR), sun-dried (SD), and oven-dried (OD) cabya. In addition, their water activity was also measured. The results demonstrated that drying process caused substantial alterations of cabya between pre- and post-drying. In terms of dimension, the drying process at 80 °C for 6 h resulted in about 20% reduction compared with initial length and diameter of cabya. Meanwhile, the cabya weight was drastically altered by the process, reaching up to 58.26% weight loss following 6 h of oven-drying. Based on image analysis, mean intensity of RGB components in FR, SD and OD samples varied significantly, suggesting a variability of cabya color. Furthermore, water activity (aw) of these samples differed remarkably, i.e., 0.92, 0.75, and 0.56, respectively. This experiment highlighted remarkable alterations of dried cabya under oven-drying process.