4. Conclusions
Traditionally, red colorants of peppers (Paprika Red) are usually
extracted from dried red peppers in the industrial production.
However, the red pigments would be destroyed in the drying
process. Meanwhile, lots of energy were consumed and multifarious
equipments with comprehensive procedureswere also needed
in the thermal drying process of FRPs. In this work, fresh red
peppers without any drying process were directly used as materials
for stage extraction of capsaicinoids and red pigments with ethanol
as solvent. Through combination of first extraction of capsaicinoids
and then extraction of red pigments, the capsaicinoids would be
removed entirely from the FRPs with 40e50% ethanol aqueous in
which the losses of red pigments is about 0.8e1.7% and then the red
colorants were extracted from the residues without capsaicinoids
with 95% ethanol. The other conditions were same in both of
different extraction stages. They included that the extractive temperature
of water bath is at 90 C; the ratio of solvent to material is
4 (mL/g) and the extractive time is 120 min. Under these conditions,
the total yields of red pigments could arrived at 89.8% in total
contents of FRPs with a twice-extraction. It was about 2.2-fold that
of DRPs of equivalent FRPs. Compared with the conventional production
processes, the new processes are simple with a high yield of
red pigments.