Microwavable Cheese
With increasing time pressures Europeans are engaging more and more in ‘on the move’ eating. In tandem with this consumers have become increasingly health conscious and this is reflected in the global functional foods market.
In response to this trend Professor Dolores O’Riordan and her colleagues at the School of Agriculture, Food Science and Veterinary Medicine have developed ingredient technology for the production of what might seem like the impossible – a hand-held, microwaveable cheese snack that is virtually fat free and is high in fibre. What’s more, when you zap it in the microwave it does not degenerate into a greasy mess but transforms in to a crispy texture.
“The product was developed in response to the consumer demand for healthy snack food. The time starved consumer by necessity eats on the go. The product is high in prebiotic fibre, high in protein and with little to no fat, satisfying consumer desire for healthy foods”, said Professor. O’Riordan.
Funded by the Department of Agriculture and Food, Dolores and her colleagues began the work of incorporating fibre in foods while maintaining their sensory properties. “We worked with a prebiotic fibre that had clinically proven health benefits and developed a cheese product containing high levels of this fibre. When we characterised the physical properties of this product we hypothesised that it had potential for expansion to a puffed crisp product on heating. Further research brought this to fruition.”
“Critical to the development, was our school’s food processing and packaging facilities and a suite of analytical equipment to assess the physical and chemical properties of food”, said Professor O’Riordan. These included NMR to determine water mobility, DSC to assess ingredient interaction, electron microscopy to examine microstructure, instrumentation to measure texture characteristics, and chromatography units for flavour assessment.
Parents are also recognising the benefits of healthier snacks for their children. Now thanks to Dolores and her team they can have a high fibre, bite size ‘cheese’ snack, that can be eaten as is, or cooked in a microwave to produce a novel expanded crispy cheese product.Mr. M. O’Sullivan has worked in the cheese/cheese flavour area since the mid 1980’s . Third investigator, Dr. Jim Lyng has been the principal investigator in a number of projects which focused on novel process technologies. He has considerable expertise in the area of microwave heating, thermal and dielectric properties of foods. Postdoctoral fellow Dr Elaine Duggan and PhD student Joshua Arimi also contributed.
