Studies on development of kneader and ball former for chhana in rasogolla production : Part II: Development of chhana ball former and its evaluation

Abstract

Rasogolla is the most popular Indian dairy sweet and is spherical in shape. Chhana, a product obtained by acid coagulation of hot milk followed by draining of whey, is used as base material for the preparation of rasogolla. Traditionally chhana was manually kneaded and cut into lumps, worked between palms to make chhana ball. In India rasogolla’s projected demand is 6000 tonnes in 2009. In order to meet ever-increasing demand rasogolla production must be mechanized. A ball-forming device along with continuous cooker will be able to mechanize the process of rasogolla making. Keeping the above fact in view a chhana ball former was developed and evaluated for its performance in terms of sphericity. Chhana ball was made using mechanically kneaded chhana (93.46 cm/s as optimized in Part I) under the following operating conditions: 200 and 250 strokes/min, 5 and 10 cm stroke length, 0% and 5% slope in SS plain, SS perforated and acrylic sheet as ball forming surfaces. Spherical shape was judged by means of sphericity. Experiments laid out on factorial completely randomized design revealed that chhana ball can be successfully made at 200 strokes/min, 5 cm stroke length in SS plain surface with 0% slope and the sphericity values of chhana ball and rasogolla was 0.880 and 0.876, respectively.