Abstract: Sugar, vinegar, sodium caseinate and perilla oil may ameliorat peppery tastes according to our literature review and life experience. Tasting experiments were designed to evaluate the ameliorative effects of the four substances on peppery tastes. For this purpose, discriminant functions were established by stepwise discriminant analysis and tested by re-substitution method and jackknife methods. The results showed that sodium caseinate, vinegar and perilla oil rather than sugar contributed to the amelioration of peppery tastes in the decreasing order: sodium caseinate > vinegar > perilla oil, with standard function coefficients of 1.015, 0.339 and 0.144, respectively. The discriminant functions were used to classify the test samples based on these parameters and a scatter diagram was plotted. The results revealed that the discriminant model could rank the ameliorative effects on peppery tastes at four levels. The accuracy of re-substitution and jackknife methods were 98% and 88%, respectively, indicating that the established discriminant functions were robust and reliable. The evaluation system established in this experiment was effective in assessing the ameliorative effect of different substances on peppery tastes, and thus it deserves wide application.

Key words: discriminant analysis, re-substitution method, jackknife method, amelioration of peppery tastes