1-Penten-3-one with its fresh and pungent smell at a very low odor threshold of 0.94 μg/L water has been characterized as impact aroma compound in many foods, such as grapefruit, orange juice, black tea, olive oil, or tomatoes. While its importance to the fresh sensation of unstored not-from-concentrate (NFC) orange juice was recently confirmed by aroma recombinates, a total loss was determined already after 4 weeks in NFC orange juice stored at 0 °C. Until now, the degradation pathway of this compound has not been clarified. Systematic model studies resulted in the identification of 1-hydroxy-3-pentanone and 4-hydroxy-3,8-decanedione as degradation products as well as S-(3-oxopentyl)-l-cysteine in the presence of the amino acid. In orange juice samples, it was found that the elevated content of 1-hydroxy-3-pentanone indicates a thermal processing, while S-(3-oxopentyl)-l-cysteine showed a significant increase during cold storage. Additionally, both compounds were identified in other food samples, such as commercial orange juices, pickled olives and olive oil, fresh tomatoes and commercial tomato juice, and black tea.
Keywords: 1-hydroxy-3-pentanone; 1-penten-3-one; S-(3-oxopentyl)-l-cysteine; black tea; degradation products; ethyl vinyl ketone; olive oil; tomato juice.