Volatile fingerprinting of chestnut flours from traditional Emilia Romagna (Italy) cultivars

The volatile profile of nine monocultivar chestnut flours, obtained from fruits grown in Italy (Parma province), was characterised by a head-space solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME) coupled with GC–MS technique. The volatile fraction was composed of 44 main compounds belonging to different classes, mainly aldehydes, ketones, alcohols, furans and terpenes. Aldehydes, in particular hexanal, are the most abundant components. In order to better understand the origin of the different volatile compounds during the drying and milling processes, samples of fresh fruit were also analysed by the same technique and the data obtained were statistically and critically compared in order to get a picture of the volatile evolution in chestnut from fresh fruit to flour. Finally, the nine monocultivar flours were chemometrically classified on the basis of the main odour descriptors associated with the volatile fingerprinting.