Characterization of Commercial Cheese Regarding Thermophysical Properties and Application of Multivariate Statistical Analysis to Elaborate Product Mapping

Abstract

AbstractA variety of 25 commercial cheese were analyzed by means of four different methods to evaluate thermophysical parameters in order to estimate methods with high potential to differentiate between cheese varieties. Rheological properties of different temperatures were obtained by a dynamic oscillatory shear test. Furthermore, stretchability, meltability and the formation of free oil were obtained. Principal component analysis was applied to the data set to receive a mapping of the cheese. A reduction of the analyzed parameters to three principal components accounting for 76.3% of the total variation was achieved, indicating that the methods are well suited to characterize the cheese samples. Mapping of the obtained scores points out gaps and indicates missing products. This was demonstrated by including different experimental cheese with modified manufacturing protocols to the data set. Therefore, mapping supports cheese producers to design new products with specified characteristics by influencing the manufacturing protocol.Practical ApplicationsMapping of different commercial cheese visualizes cheese products in terms of thermophysical properties. This identifies missing products and supports accelerated product development by creating products with defined properties by influencing the manufacturing protocol. Furthermore, the availability of reliable methods and parameters to describe the thermophysical properties of cheese is of major importance for the cheese manufacturer in terms of quality management and characterizing cheese.