2.3. Preliminary studies
Four blocks of experiments were carried out to study the effects of different processing and storage conditions on the quality and shelf-life of partially dehydrated peppers. From each block, only the conditions that yielded the best results were selected for the following steps. These studies included the type of cutting (into halves, fourths, sixths and eighths), the drying conditions (Table 1), the application of pretreatments: blanching in water (97C for 5 min) and washing with chlorinated water (100 mg chlorine/L) and packaging in different atmospheres: air, N2and 3 and 5 ml/ 100 ml O2/CO2, respectively (Gorny, 2003). All the samples were stored at 81 C and were maintained until being organoleptically rejected