Efeito das caraterísticas fisico-químicas no comportamento reológico dos queijos Paiva

Abstract

Transformation of milk into another foods, for example in cheese, allows to diversify and improve the nutritional quality of our everyday food habits. Its importance it’s due to the fact that milk is a highly nutritional aliment, that’s because on its composition it has proteins, fat, mineral salts and vitamins. Cheese production it’s a very complex process, due to the various phases and biochemical changes that occurs throughout the process. The main production processes are, coagulation, desorption, salting and curing. According to the technological parameters acting at the level of these four phases we can a large variety of different cheeses. The composition (water, protein, fat and minerals percentages), pH of the curd, as well as the conditions that the curing occurs are deeply related with the texture, flavor and aroma of the product. Of the more than two thousand varieties of cheeses, their rheological and texture properties are extremely important to the quality standardization. The objective of this work was to study the chemical and physical characteristics of the "Prato Gordo" and "Barra Light" cheeses during the ripening process (0, 8, 15 and 21 days) and of "Fresco Meio Gordo" cheese only at the end of its manufacturing process, only because these cheese are not ripened. Cheeses from each batch were monitored for their moisture content and pH (chemical parameters) and rheological and texture analyses (physical parameters) were performed. The results showed that the cheeses, despite starting from the same raw material - milk, differed from each other, since they resulted from different modes of production, giving rise to cheeses with quite different characteristics as far as chemical and physical properties are concerned. At the chemical level, all cheeses presented moisture contents and pH values that were in agreement with the reference values of the company – Laticínios do Paiva. At the physical level, it was concluded that in the "Prato Gordo" cheese at the end of the maturation process, the values obtained in the texture parameters are higher, except for the parameters of hardness, cohesiveness and resilience about of "Barra Light" cheese, the opposite has already been verified, that is, at the end of the maturation process, the lower the values obtained in these parameters.

Date of Award	18 Oct 2018
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Susana Barros (Supervisor) & Ana Maria Gomes (Co-Supervisor)