Spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.) is a representative green leafy vegetable commonly consumed fresh or as a ready-to-cook frozen product, with increasing consumption because of its many health-related properties. Among leafy vegetables, spinach poses a major concern in terms of pesticide residue detection due to common phytotechnical practices. In this study, spinach leaves were treated in the open field with three commercial pesticide formulations containing propamocarb, lambda-cyhalothrin, fluopicolide and chlorantraniliprole at the highest concentration. The effects of the successive processing steps of washing, blanching, freezing and frozen storage were evaluated on the levels of the four pesticide residues and the degradation product (propamocarb n-desmethyl). The washing step caused a reduction of fluopicolide and chlorantraniliprole of -47% and -43%, respectively, while having a mild effect on lambda-cyhalothrin content (+5%). A two-minute blanching step allowed for the reduction of pesticides content ranging from -41% to -4% with respect to the washed sample. Different behaviors were depicted for longer blanching times, mainly for propamocarb, reaching -56% after 10 min of treatment. Processing factors higher than 1 were reported mainly for lambda-cyhalothrin and fluopicolide. Frozen storage led to a slight increase in the pesticide content in samples treated for 6 and 10 min. The optimal blanching treatment for spinach, submitted to freezing and frozen storage, seems to be 2 min at 80 °C.
Keywords: blanching; frozen storage; household processing; lambda-cyhalothrin; pesticide residues; processing factor; propamocarb; propamocarb n-desmethyl; spinach; washing.