Effects of thermal treatments on durum wheat pasta flavour during production process: a modelling approach to provide added-value to pasta dried at low temperatures

Pasta is a key element of the Mediterranean Diet and it has been declared by Unesco intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Despite seems a simple food, only made of semolina and water, pasta is produced following a multistep process that strongly affect the final product. Drying stage is the one that has the greater influence on its organoleptic/nutritional characteristics. This study aimed to analyse the flavour of pasta to test whether the different drying treatments (High Temperature-Short time or Low Temperature-Long time) have a direct impact on its composition and consequently whether they could influence the end-product quality. The headspace solid-phase microextraction was optimized using an experimental design and 52 samples were analysed by HS-SPME/GC-MS and classified by PLS-DA. The resulting classification model (validated by repeated double cross-validation and permutation tests) allowed correctly predicting more than 80% of samples, confirming that drying may have a significant impact on pasta flavour.