Lactic acid bacteria as structural building blocks in non-fat whipping cream analogues

Abstract

Lactic acid bacteria as food ingredients, show the potential of being exploited as structural building blocks in the formulation of colloidal foods such as emulsion and foam. The present work provides approaches to using lactic acid bacteria combined with two components, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC) and casein sodium (CS) salt, to fully replace the saturated fat content in whipping cream analogues. By involving both hydrophobic and hydrophilic strains, the whipped cream exhibited comparable overrun (107%) and drainage stability (drainage area 1.4 mm2) to the commercial dairy whipping cream (30% and 2.7 mm2, respectively), where the foam stability was greatly affected by the Pickering capability and aggregating properties of the used strains. All the whipped cream displayed solid-like behaviors (G’>G″) and standing properties to different degrees (G’ ≈ 30–491 Pa), depending on the strength of bacterial aggregation jointly determined by both the intrinsic surface properties and the influence of added HPMC and CS components. No negative impacts on bacterial viability was found for the added components and the whipping process. The idea of involving edible lactic acid bacteria as fat replacers can thus provide possible alternatives to using nature-derived components as active structural building blocks for colloidal food systems such as whipping cream.