New blend product : development of a product recipe

Abstract: Milk fat is getting more and more expensive and the demand for natural products is in-creasing. The combination of increased milk price and larger demands from consumers result in that a dairy food company wants to offer consumers a natural blended spread product with excellent butter flavour. A project to develop a recipe for such a product has been carried out. Based on the lit-erature and the company’s collective knowledge of the properties of fats pilot runs for test-ing various recipes, sensory, chemical and bacteriological assessments of the pilot-produced products and test baking with the products was made. The results from the dif-ferent experiments were analysed statistically by multivariate data analysis. Two days conducted for experiments at pilot plant resulted in six different products with different ratios of vegetable fat and butterfat as well as different ratios of fractionated fat. The changing of the type of fat in the product was done to get a product with the right taste, hardness and other desired properties. After sensory, bacteriological, chemical and baking analysis of the products it was seen that one of the products was better than the others when comparing it to the reference products used. The project has resulted in a product recipe to work on to see if the product is to pack in foil. If a product with the same characteristics as reference product one is to be developed it is probably needed to fraction the fat or to ad a stabilizer/emulsifier as this will flatten the melting curve and particularly increase the proportion of solid fat at the higher tem-peratures. Moreover, it is important not to flatten the fat melting curve too much as it means a risk that odd flavour appears in the cakes baked on the product.