3.2. Sensory analysis
Sensory quality (Table 3) is an important aspect to be considered
when non-thermal technologies are applied for preservation
purposes. Panellists did not perceive any significant difference in
appearance, sweetness and acidity of the apple and cranberry juice
blend processed by the selected hurdle combinations, when compared
to a conventionally pasteurised sample. However, the odour
and the flavour of the resultant juice were significantly changed by
the non-thermal treatments. In particular, the treatments which
included MTS as a hurdle had a significantly lower odour
(p < 0.05) (5.5 versus 6.5) and flavour (p < 0.01) (4.7 versus 5.6)
scores than the thermally treated product. By contrast, the juice
processed by HILP + PEF or UV + PEF received a similar (pP0.05)
score to the control for both attributes. Evaluation of the overall
acceptability revealed that the sample processed by the combination
UV + PEF was the most preferred product (5.8), followed by
the sample treated by HILP + PEF (5.7). However, when the
combined non-thermal approach included MTS, the acceptabilit