To Study the Effect of Drying Methods on Physic-Chemical Characteristics of Fermented Soybean (hawaijar)

The study was conducted to compare and study the feasibility and effect on nutritional properties of fermented soybean during storage at ambient and refrigeration conditions for which the soybeans were fermented through naturally fermenting strains. This study is an attempt to determine the chemical proximate analysis of hawaijar and the nutritional changes occurring during processing and storage in expectation that the data generated can be used as the nutritional reference and as the food regulatory standard. For comparative study the soybeans after fermentation were tray dried and solar dried and their nutritional properties were checked accordingly at varying intervals of 0day, 30 days, 60 days and 120 days. The physiochemical parameters namely (moisture, ash, protein, crude fiber and yeast and mold count) were evaluated on the successive days of storage to assess the durability to consumers. The physiochemical analysis showed that with the increase of storage period there was considerable increase in moisture content during storage i.e from 8.9% to 11.89%. But it was observed that the storage conditions do have a significant amount of loss of protein i.e. from 29.10% to 27.50%, and crude fiber i.e. from 6.52% to 4.28%. However there was little change in ash content during storage i.e from 1.30% to 1.28%. Samples that were stored in refrigerating conditions showed less loss. Moreover the effect of loss was observed maximum in the samples that were sun dried and the losses were found more in samples that were stored in ambient conditions. The microbiological study revealed even on the 120 days of storage the yeast and mold count was within permissible limit (7.8×102 cfu/g) and it was acceptable for consumption.