Efecto de diferentes temperaturas de almacenamiento sobre la calidad física en dos cultivares de durazno (Prunus persica L.)

The peach fruit production in Venezuela is an activity meant for to the domestic market, with few evaluations of quality and postharvest behavior of fruits. The objective of this research was to evaluate the physical quality of peach cultivars ‘Yellow Creole’ and ‘Jarillazo’ under different temperatures. It was performed in the laboratory of Postharvest Graduate Agronomy, using uniform fruit size, color and apparently free from mechanical damage and pests, category II (86,4 to 106,4 g) from Colonia Tovar, Aragua state, stored at 4 and 10 ± 1 o C. Treatments were arranged in a completely randomized design with factorial arrangement. Physical quality variables were measured in three experiments with four replicates per treatment for a total of 288 fruit evaluated. These were performed every three days until an unacceptable overall quality. The results showed that the cultivar ‘Jarillazo’ had the highest fruit size and higher percentage of pulp to ‘Yellow Creole’. Loss of firmness in the fruit through time was obtained, being higher (0,087 inch) at a temperature of 10 ° C for both cultivars. A loss of the water content, as reflected in the decrease of the variable fresh mass and diameters was obtained. The color indexes allowed to satisfactorily assessing the evolution of color change being faster at 10 ° C than at 4 ° C in both cultivars.