| dc.description.abstract | Yoghurt is widely consumed across the globe and is produced by fermentation of milk. However, sweetening yoghurt using honey decreases the viscosity of the final product due to honey’s high moisture content compared to other sweeteners such sucrose. This makes the addition of stabilizers inevitable. Therefore, the general objective of this study was to screen for suitable stabilizer s for use in honey sweetened yoghurt.
During preliminary investigations, honey sweetened yoghurt (HSY) was prepared with addition of three different stabilisers including gelatin, starch and Carboxy methyl Cellulose (CMC) together with the experimental control which had no stabilizer added to it. The yoghurt samples to which starch and gelatin had been added formed fairly viscous gels. However, the yoghurt sample to which CMC had been added did not form a viscous gel and the particles of the stabilizer did not effectively dissolve in the sample. Therefore, the use of CMC as a stabilizer in HSY was discontinued and further studies proceeded using only gelatin and starch.
Based on the combined results of WHC and STS, 0.6 (%w/v) was found to be the most optimum stabilizer concentration for both gelatin and starch when used in honey sweetened yoghurt. At the optimum concentration of 0.6 (%w/v), the yoghurt sample treated with gelatin had a WHC of 55.33% while that treated with starch had a value of 50.67 %. On the other hand, the yoghurt sample treated with gelatin and that treated with starch both had a similar STS value of 48.67%. On account of a higher WHC, gelatin was therefore selected to be the most suitable stabilizer for use in honey sweetened yoghurt.
Upon determination of proximate composition, honey sweetened yoghurt stabilised with gelatin was found to have a moisture content of 69.77%, carbohydrate content of 27.03%, protein concentration of 1.83%, ash content of 0.5% and fat content of 0.85%. Therefore, HSY was a fairly nutritious product.
HSY treated with gelatin stabiliser had significantly (P<0.05) higher scores of approximately 8 for all the sensory attributes of appearance (8.45), Texture (8.09), Flavor (7.91) and overall acceptability (8.09) compared to the control sample whose scores were; appearance = 6.00, Texture = 6.09, Flavor = 6.64 and overall acceptability = 6.73. Therefore, the application of gelatin as a stabiliser improved all the tested sensory attributes of honey sweetened yoghurt. | en_US |
