Ginger - chemistry, technology, and quality evaluation. II.

This monograph, published in 2 parts, comprehensively reviews production, trade, processing, chemistry, and evaluation of quality. Botany, world var., agronomy, crop improvement and potential are reviewed briefly with emphasis on the yield of functional components. Processing for the market, international trade patterns, and factors influencing them are discussed. Derived products such as ginger powder, syruped ginger, volatile oil, and oleoresin are discussed in greater detail. The increasing world demand for quality products of added value such as the oleoresin and volatile oil show the prospects for their production in the growing countries. The chemistry of the components which contribute aroma and pungency that characterize ginger is critically reviewed. The second part deals with evaluation of quality. The physico-chemical parameters prescribed as a measure of quality for ginger and its products in the existing standards can assure only hygienic quality and purity, and possibly the source, when new parameters such as GC-fingerprints are included. The importance of sensorily evaluating flavour quality is emphasized to understand the variation in flavour quality required by the industrial and retail markets. Related areas, such as problems in sensory evaluation of intense flavoured substances, objective flavour profile analysis, and correlation of instrumental and sensory data, are discussed and our recent work in this area is summarized. Areas where more research are needed are indicated. Other areas briefly discussed are functional, physiological, and toxicological properties in use of ginger; biosynthetic aspects of the components stimulating flavour; and structure and pungency and chemistry of spices from allied species and genera. A comprehensive bibliography is provided to aid in further study and research.