BACKGROUND An interesting approach to improve dried foods nutritional properties, functionality, and sensorial attributes, is by taking advantage of pre-treatments for incorporating components into the food matrix. Based on this, this work studied the incorporation of black carrot anthocyanins in apple tissue by using ethanol (concentrations 0-300 mL L-1) as a pre-treatment to ultrasound-assisted convective drying. Samples were pre-treated in acidified ethanol solutions, with and without anthocyanins, and then dried (50 degrees C, 1 m s(-1)) by convective and ultrasound-assisted convective (21.77 kHz, 20.5 kW m(-3)) drying. Both the drying process improvement and the obtained product properties were studied. RESULTS The anthocyanins did not influence the drying kinetics. In contrast, time reduction was > 50% by using both ethanol pre-treatments and ultrasound. Ethanol pre-treatments decr...