The bottle gourds are unique fruit vegetables composed of varied types of fleshes that play a critical role in the perception of firmness. The firmness may serve as an indicator of processability to the food processor and of eating quality to the consumer. Various investigations were conducted to evaluate important physical properties of freshly harvested bottle gourd fruits and also to assess the firmness of freshly harvested bottle gourd fruits so as to develop the relationship between physical characteristics and firmness of freshly harvested bottle gourd fruits. Fifteen freshly harvested bottle gourd fruits (cv. ABG-1) were selected randomly for determining their physical properties. The Magness-Tylor fruit firmness tester (type: 53201) was used to evaluate the firmness. All the routine calculations like obtaining mean value, standard deviation and also correlating different physical parameters to fruit firmness were done for each of the test using Microsoft Excel 2007 programme. From the data, the significant relationship between various physical parameters and fruit firmness was observed. It was noted that the firmness of fruit was reduced with the increase in length of fruit while the increase in fruit width increased the fruit firmness. Hence, the fruits having comparatively more width and less length will be better in firmness. Also, the fruit of comparatively lower weight are better than the fruits of heavy weight from the firmness point of view.

Keywords: Bottle gourd; Physical characteristics; Firmness; Fruit quality; Penetrometer.