The production of white mulberry molasses powders with prebiotic carrier by dehumidified air‐assisted spray drying.

White mulberry molasses was powdered with the addition of prebiotic carrier by conventional spray drying (inlet/outlet air temperature: 180/80°C) and by dehumidified air‐assisted spray drying at low temperature (inlet/outlet: 80/45°C). As a consequence of decreasing the drying temperature, it was possible to obtain powder containing 90% of molasses (solids, wt/wt), which was not presented for this kind of material before. Moreover, highly satisfactory powder recovery (64.0–96.5%) was observed for the variants spray dried at low temperature. Physicochemical properties of powders were investigated. All of obtained powders characterized with water activity (Aw) below 0.25, which classify them as physiochemically and microbiologically stable. Powder spray dried traditionally was characterized with irregular particles of bigger dimension than powders obtained at low drying temperature. Furthermore, total phenolics content and antioxidant capacity of molasses before and after drying were studied. The expression of retention coefficient was proposed to describe the effect of drying on total phenolics content of dried material. In this calculation the presence of carrier is excluded because it is not the source of phenolics in powder. Spray drying at low drying temperature enabled better preservation of the polyphenolics (TPC varying from 1,491 ± 38 to 2,852 ± 48 mg GAE/100 g solids) and antioxidant capacity (EC50 ABTS ranging from 0.15 ± 0.01 to 0.10 ± 0.01 mg solids/mL) of white mulberry molasses than conventional spray drying (TPC 1,412 ± 13 mg GAE/100 g solids and EC50 ABTS 0.23 ± 0.04 mg solids/mL). Practical Applications: White mulberry molasses powders may be a more practical alternative to concentrated molasses because of the high viscosity of molasses leading to problems with dosing, storage, and transportation. Molasses powdered at low temperature contains only 10% of a carrier, and as a result of high antioxidant capacity may be implemented in functional foods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]