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Article history
Received: 10 July 2014
Received in revised form: 17 January 2015
Accepted: 28 January 2015
Keywords
Stevia
Ice cream
Textural
Rheological
Alternative sweetener
Abstract
Ice cream contains high sugar content and therefore it is in contradiction with the concept of healthy diet. The objective of this study is to determine the suitability of using stevia as an alternative natural sweetener in making ice cream. In- house ice cream formulation (as the control) and three different concentrations of stevia ice cream formulations of (A, B and C) were used. Physical properties of the ice cream such as the overrun, total soluble solid, meltdown rate, rheology, and textural properties were evaluated. All ice cream samples exhibited a non-Newtonian flow with pseudoplastic behavior. Stevia ice cream has a lower melting rate and has a higher sustainability. The power law also showed that apparent viscosities of stevia ice cream were higher. Therefore, stevia can be used as a natural sugar substitute in ice cream production.
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Introduction
Due to the high prevalence of obesity and Type 2 diabetes among children and adolescents, people are now more aware of their health status and hence conscious of their diet. This health-conscious decision poses a formidable challenge to the ice cream industry. As a result, the ice cream market trend is moving towards a low calorie, low sugar ice cream formulation and with excellent texture and sensory properties to gain the consumers' satisfaction.
Consequently, a number of studies had been carried out in developing new functional ice creams with ingredients such as dietary fibers (Soukoulis et al., 2009), probiotics (Akin et al., 2007), low glycemic index sweeteners (Whelan et al., 2008), and alternative sweeteners such as xylitiol, sorbitol, and maltitol (Soukoulis et al., 2010). Mainly, these innovative ice creams are produced using artificial sweeteners. There are few studies done using natural sweeteners in ice cream production.
Stevia, a natural sweetener (Ozdemir et al., 2008), has been used by many food and beverage companies in Japan, Korea, and South America (Panpatil and Polasa, 2008; Goyal et al., 2010; Hossain et al., 2010). Stevia is used to replace sucrose in yogurt, soy sauce (Hossain et al., 2010), and candies (Goyal et al., 2010)....