Improvement of olive oil phenolics content by means of enzyme formulations: Effect of different enzyme activities and levels

The present work deals with the development of an enzymatic treatment aiming at producing high-quality olive oil with increased phenolics content and antioxidant activity. Three different enzyme formulations, specifically pectinase, hemicellulase and cellulase (A), pectinase and hemicellulase (B), and only pectinase (C), were used either at three different level of each or in ternary and binary mixtures at a constant level. All of them were added to the olive paste (Italian cultivar Coratina) at the beginning of the malaxation step. Results demonstrated that an increased enzyme level led to higher phenolics content in the oils, and such an effect was found to be enzyme dependent, being greater when using formulation A, followed by formulations B and C. Two significant correlations were obtained between total polyphenols and o-diphenols contents versus antiradical power (R² = 0.8743 and R² = 0.8635, respectively), which pointed out the effectiveness of the proposed enzymatic treatment to produce olive oils characterized by low susceptibility to oxidation. A synergistic effect between the different enzymatic activities contained in the single formulations was observed by combining enzymes A and B. The ternary mixture was selected as the most efficient enzymatic system ensuring the highest phenolics content increase (40 and 37% for total polyphenols and o-diphenols contents, respectively) compared to the other enzymes when used at the same level.