Fermentation and Process Optimisation of Soibum-A Traditional Food of Manipur India, Using Serratia sp.

Soibum, a naturally fermented bamboo-shoot food, is an important ethnical food of Manipur, India. This study was undertaken to optimise conditions for in vitro fermentation of bamboo shoot and to evaluate the nutritional parameter. Microbiological analysis was conducted to determine the bacterial population. In this study, bamboo shoot had been fermented and process optimised by using a bacterium (isolate FB2–4) which was identified as Serratia marcescens. It was used as inoculum for fermentation at different parameters and nutritional quality of final product was analysed. The experiments were varied for (1) fermentation of sterilised bamboo shoot with 16 different isolates (2) fermentation by using FB2–4 at different temperatures (30°C, 35°C and 40°C), (3) effect of different inoculum size of FB2–4 fermentation (104, 106, 108 cfu/ml). Bacterial isolate FB2–4 results better product compared with other isolates. The pH of sterilised in-vitro fermented samples was found to be around 3.7 and that of the control was recorded to be around pH 6. The amount of protein, sugar, amino acid in fermented Soibum was found to be 2.85g/100g, 1.2g/100g, 0.54g/100g, respectively. The nutritional parameter including concentrations of protein, sugar, amino acid were better when fermentation was done at temperature 30°C (3.92±0.5g/100g, 10.2±0.01g/100g, 0.54±0.04 g/100g, respectively) and inoculum size 104 cfu/ml (3.77±0.1g/100g, 10.6±0.06g/100g, 0.14±0.04g/100g, respectively). In this study, in-vitro fermentation condition was found enhanced good nutritional parameters compared with the Soibum.