Food | Understanding Yogurt Texture and Stability through Rheological Characterization
This report explores how temperature, shear rate, and structural rearrangements affect yogurt rheology using flow curve analysis and temperature ramp testing, providing insights for quality control, product development, and process optimization.
Rheology is essential for yogurt manufacturers to ensure texture consistency, mouthfeel, stability, and processing efficiency. From raw material selection to fermentation and cold storage, viscosity and flow behavior determine how yogurt behaves during pumping, filling, mixing, and consumption. Yogurt is a structured dairy gel formed through milk protein aggregation and lactic acid fermentation, with its rheological behavior governed by several interacting structural elements, including:
- Casein micelle network formation
- Fat globule interactions
- Exopolysaccharides (EPS) from cultures
- Serum phase viscosity
- Temperature-dependent structural rearrangements
Achieving a desirable yogurt texture requires a delicate balance between firmness, smoothness, and flowability. Excessively high viscosity can lead to poor pumpability, clogging, and uneven filling, whereas low viscosity results in weak body, whey separation, and reduced consumer acceptance.
Anton Paar RheolabQC equipped with a concentric cylinder measuring system.
The selection of the measuring system depends on the sample structure, measurement objective, and practical conditions. For structured products such as yogurt, geometries that reduce wall slip - such as vane spindles or sandblasted cylinders are recommended. A big advantage of vane spindles is that they do not destroy the sample’s structure when immersed in the sample in comparison to cylindrical measuring systems.
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