Ricerc@Sapienza

Pasta, a key product in both the Italian tradition and consumption habits, is a food spread worldwide due to its nutritional and organoleptic characteristics. Pasta has been widely studied for its chemical and biological features and, from an economic point of view, to evaluate its impact on market and on consumers choice. Safety and quality of pasta depend on both the raw materials and the manufacturing process used. To define a “total quality” of pasta product, studies on objective parameters, experimental measurable, are necessary to direct the consumer to make a more informed choice.

An HS-SPME/GC–MS (Head Space-Solid Phase Micro Extraction/Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry) method was developed and applied to 79 beers (craft and industrial products) selected among the most common brands of mass-produced beer to evaluate their flavour profile. 111 volatiles were identified in the samples. PLS-DA (Partial Least Squares-Discriminant Analysis) was used to classify beers according to their different production methods.

An HS-SPME/GC-MS procedure was optimised in order to characterize the aromatic fingerprint of 82 spirit drinks, belonging to Grappa GI samples and other distillates. “Grappa” is a geographical indication (GI) allowed by EC Regulation No 110/2008 only for Italian-made grape marc spirit. Multivariate chemometric techniques were applied to the collected chromatographic profiles in order to classify the samples on the basis of chemical information provided by their volatile composition data.