Impact of starch on milk protein functionality in food applications

Abstract Text: Dairy foods are increasingly formulated with several functional ingredients such as milk proteins, starch and hydrocolloids. Functional ingredients provide several key properties to dairy foods including process robustness, texture, eating quality and shelf stability.  Starch has been a very important component of dairy foods including yogurt, cheese and dairy beverages.  In order to formulate consumer winning dairy products, it is very important to understand the mechanisms and interactions as well as true synergies between functional ingredients. However, both starch and milk proteins are very complex and shedding light to the precise nature of the starch-milk protein interactions requires fundamental studies focusing on physic-chemical properties of starch and milk proteins, starch base and granular nature (intact vs fragmented/solubilized), starch surface properties (protein content/location etc) to list the few key points. Additionally, it is very important to understand the processing parameters such as temperature and pressure on starch-protein interactions. In this presentation we will review the current understanding of starch-protein interactions.  We will discuss the impact of starch base (waxy corn, tapioca and dent corn) on bulk properties of fermented dairy products, and relate the starch gelatinization temperature, granular integrity, process temperature and pressure on starch protein interactions and bulk properties of fermented dairy products.  We will also discuss the instrumental and sensory measurements of observed behavior and propose mechanisms of starch impact on protein functionality.

Keywords: Starch. dairy, yogurt, processing, protein, interactions