Extraction of maleic hydrazide residues from potato crisps and their determination using high-performance liquid chromatography with UV and atmospheric pressure chemical ionisation mass spectrometric detection.

A method was required for the determination of maleic hydrazide residues in potato crisps. A published method for the extraction of the analyte from onions and potatoes was evaluated and found to be inappropriate due to the inability of the extracting solvent to penetrate the oily matrix. A method was developed to overcome this problem; the resulting recovery data (mean = 92.9%, R.S.D. = 8.3%, n = 16) confirmed its efficiency, and was used to analyse 48 retail potato crisp samples. To confirm possible residues identified by screening with HPLC-UV, an HPLC-atmospheric pressure chemical ionization MS method was developed. There was good agreement between the data obtained from the two detection techniques (R2 = 0.978, slope = 1.11).