Polymers for structure design of dairy foods

Abstract

Dairy foods ranging from liquids, semi-solids to solids are considered as complex viscoelastic materials. Maintaining the physical stability over the shelf life and delivering superior mouthfeel of foods after series of treatments have always been challenging for the dairy industry. During the manufacturing process, both high shear stress and temperature changing history can significantly affect the macro- and microstructure of dairy food systems. Therefore, their physical stability and sensory attributes are altered as consequences. Food polymers as stabilizer and texturizer are used in different dairy systems for eliminating negative impacts of intensive processing treatments and for manipulating texture for meeting the specific sensory preference for a targeted group of consumers. As kinetically metastable systems, the optimum structure of dairy foods may be engineered by following a universal two steps principle: (1) Apply the proper mix of food polymers in the dairy food formulation; (2) Process the formula with dedicated parameters and procedures. Although the principle is simple, the implementation is complicated. Such existence of challenge is due to the detailed interaction mechanisms between non-dairy polymers and dairy components in various physicochemical environments are not entirely understood. In this chapter, the nondairy polymers induced destabilization/stabilization of dairy systems are explained, the technical challenges of stabilization of dairy systems are discussed. It focuses on three major topics regarding dairy food structure design: (1) Formulation strategy of thickening dairy matrices; (2) Formulation strategy of increasing perception of the creaminess of dairy matrices; (3) The current updates about the synergetic functionality of food polymers.