Saba, A Traditional Grape Molasse From Italy: Preliminary Analytical Characterization in Comparison With Fruit Pekmez

Fruit juice molasses, from grapes, mulberries and many other fruits, still represent important traditional food products from the Balkans to the Caucasus, where they are indicated as “pekmez” and its linguistic variants. In Italy, grapes have always been primarily used for wine production. However, locally available resources were fully exploited in the past: saba or sapa is a grape molasse obtained from unfermented juice slowly boiled for 24-48 hours, to obtain a brownish, dense, very sweet syrup, storable for long time. Saba was used as a food, to accompany cereal gruels or bread and, in less restricted situations, to season meat, cheese, and to prepare particular pastries (“tortelli”) and jams (“savor”). After being almost forgotten, in recent years saba has been resumed and is nowadays produced by local firms throughout central Italy, where it is also the subject of local festivals. In this work basic physical and chemical traits of several commercial saba samples from different areas of Italy were analyzed and compared to samples of pekmez from Turkey and Armenia and sladko from Bulgaria. Saba dry matter and soluble solid content were respectively 68% and 63%, with high variability among samples. Average titratable acidity was 14.8 g TAEs/L. Pekmez and sladko showed lower variability and higher average dry matter and Brix with respect to Italian saba, probably because of the tendency to reduce cooking time and temperature by some processors in Italy, in order to increase yield and avoid the production of unwanted molecules. Acidity was more stable and less affected by cooking, allowing to relate the differences among samples to raw materials (species or cultivars). Titratable acidity and pH were more variable in pekmez than in saba as a consequence of the very different raw materials used (mulberry, carob, pomegranate, grapes). Pomegranate pekmez had very high acidity.