Abstract: The main nutritional and functional components of different commercial brands of sufu paste including two brands from Beijing: BJ-1 and BJ-2, one brand from Hebei (HB), one brand from Shanghai (SH), and one brand from Guangdong (GD) were quantitated and compared, and the taste amino acids were analyzed by principal component analysis (PCA). The results showed that the nutritional and functional components were abundant in sufu paste, and significantly different among brands (P < 0.05). Compared with other brands, the contents of puerarin (12.18 mg/100 g), γ-aminobutyric acid (13.67 mg/100 g), stigmasterol (0.07 mg/100 g) and β-sitosterol (0.13 mg/100 g) in BJ-1 were the highest; the content of puerarin was about 2.5 times as high as that of HB and the content of β-sitosterol was 4 times as high as that of BJ-2. A total of 15 free amino acids were detected, among which, glutamate was the most abundant, followed by leucine. According to the taste characteristics, MSG-like amino acids were dominant in HB, BJ-2 and SH, while bitter amino acids were slightly prevailing in BJ-1 and GD. Sweet and tasteless amino acids were the least abundant. Principal component analysis (PCA) showed that the cumulative contribution of the first four principal components accounted for 92.70% of the total variance, which could well represent the taste amino acid composition. The comprehensive evaluation scores of taste amino acids decreased in the following order: GD > HB > BJ-1 > BJ-2 > SH.

Key words: sufu paste, nutritional components, functional components, free amino acids, principal component analysis