Assessment of jackfruit-based squash preparation methods

Abstract

Agriculture and horticulture is main occupation of farmers of Bokaro district. In Jharkhand state, Bokaro district is famous as vegetable belt. Jack fruit is produced in huge amount in Bokaro district. When jack fruit starts to ripe, rural people consumed it happily in beginning. But, after sometime, rural people left ripe jack fruit on their tree which fall down on ground and decompose after being over ripe. In this way, a huge wastage of ripe jack fruit occurred. The basic reason behind this huge wastage was lack of knowledge regarding value addition and preservation of ripe jack fruit among local rural farm families. Therefore, an OFT was conducted in Koh panchayat in year 2020 with an objective to maximum utilization of ripe jack fruit as well as to prevent its huge wastage. Three treatment were taken named as Farmers Practice (F.P.), Technological Option I (T.O.I) and Technological Option II( T.O.II). In F.P., local consumption pattern of ripe jack fruit was considered. Local rural people consumed bulbs of ripe jack fruit just as fruit. In T.O.I, squash was developed by the use of ripe jack fruit only and in T.O.II, squash was developed from ripe jack fruit blended with ripe mango. After that, calculation of all three food produce nutritive value was done. Along with this, sensory evaluation and economics was analyzed. Regarding, both nutritive value and sensory evaluation different parameters like appearance, color, taste, flavor and overall acceptability, mango blended jack fruit squash (T.O.II) found best, whereas Farmers Practice (F.P.) was cost effective among all three treatments. So, it is concluded that this ripe jack fruit based squash could help in preventing huge wastage of ripe jack fruit as well as be potential source of rural income generation for the deprived farming communities.