Sensory perception of fat in milk

The sensory properties of fat in milk were examined by sensory descriptive analysis. To date, no single food additive has been completely successful in mimicking the sensory properties of fat in milk. This experiment investigated the effects of various factors and combinations thereof on sensory properties and perceived fattiness of milk, and compared them to the actual fat content (0.1; 1.3 and 3.5% fat milk was used). The other factors studied were the addition of thickener, whitener, cream aroma and homogenisation. Multivariate data analytical methods (Partial Least Squares Regression) were applied for analysis of the data. The three former additional factors contributed significantly to perceived fattiness of the milk, and homogenisation had a small but not significant effect. It was shown that a combination of thickener, whitener and cream aroma in 0.1% fat milk was approximately successful in mimicking sensory properties of 1.3% fat milk. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.