PLANT BASED DAIRY ALTERNATIVES 2022
Dr. Ali Sedaghat Doost, Food Process
Engineer at FAM: When designing
cheese analogues, manufacturers must
not only look at appearance, utilization
properties (e.g. meltability), and taste
but also on textural behavior mainly
machineability characteristics
Machine suppliers like FAM can help process
cheese analogues by adjusting technology to
the product (photo: FAM)
January/February 2022 ¦ international-dairy.com · 37
Look beyond texture and taste
When manufacturing, or even before when designing
cheese analogues, manufacturers must not only look
at appearance, utilization properties (e.g. meltability),
and taste but also on textural behavior mainly machineability
characteristics. There are different challenges
that need to be considered when a plant-based
cheese is desired as compared to conventional natural
cheeses, such as similar physicochemical and sensorial
attributes. As there is no casein network in plantbased
cheeses and they are rather a colloidal system,
their machineability characteristics are often unknown
and difficult to predict until one has a final product at
hand.
Machineability and in particular shreddability and
diceability of a cheese play a key role for some specific
applications such as pizza and toppings by facilitating
its utilization and accelerating melting behaviours. The
shreddability and diceability of cheese are influenced
by a set of material characteristics and is mainly controlled
by a fine balance of its viscoelastic behaviour.
Soft cheeses, which have relatively high moisture
contents, low storage moduli, and high surface energies,
exhibit strong blade adhesion during cutting,
which decreases their shreddability and diceability.
Therefore, it is the utmost importance that a vegan
cheese can be processed after production, meaning
that it has the required characteristics for size reduction
processing step. The R&D applications department
of FAM is closely working with research centres
as well as manufacturers to better understand the
textural behaviour of plant-based cheeses and to provide
input on their formulated cheeses whether they
can be further processed.
In easy terms
Generally spoken, cheese analogues that have to be
shredded, grated or sliced should not have smearing
or crumbling characteristics if they are to pass processing
equipment in order to end up as an acceptable
finished product. While such characteristics have to be
managed by the manufacturer, the machine supplier
can help by adjusting its technology to the cheese analogues.
"We can work with a combination of parameters
like temperature, speed, special cutting tools, different
knife materials and the like", says Dr. Sedaghat
Doost. In the end, the FAM cutting machines evolve
with the market trends, even if the latter set a series
of new challenges. The FAM R&D department is continuing
to set up collaborations in order to gain further
knowledge in these products for the future.
/international-dairy.com
