Effect of drying methods on Thai dried chilli's hotness and pungent odour characteristics and consumer liking.
Dried chilli is widely used for its hotness and pungent odour enhancing properties. In an attempt to get a broad overview of drying effects on hotness and pungent odour characteristics contributing to dominant features of various types of Thai dried chilli, major volatile flavour 
compounds responsible for perceived hotness and pungent odour of the dried chilli-(freeze(FD), hot air (HD) and sun (SD) dried samples) were identified by trained panel (n=15) 
in conjunction with HS-SPME/GC-MS and LLE/GC-MS. Consumer liking of the three dried chilli was assessed on the basis of pungent odour and hotness characteristics by Thai 
consumers (n=120) using 9 point–category hedonic scale. The GC-MS and trained panel data were analyzed by PLS and results show that capsaicin was the main compound responsible for the oral hotness sensation, while 1-penten-3-one compound was found to be an indicator of 
strong pungent odour. The FD sample presented the highest intensity of hotness characteristic(p≤0.05). The content of 1-penten-3-one in FD was also higher than that of HD and SD. 
Although trained panellists could not differentiate between the intensities of pungent odour of FD and HD (p>0.05), consumers had a tendency to prefer HD. This research proposes that there is substantial value to analysis such as this that integrates human sensorial perception 
with objective measurement. The outputs of this research can be used to provide guidance on dried chilli product development based on consumer acceptance criteria.