Investigating the effects of ingredient proportions on the texture of Vietnamese sausage using mixture experiment design

Abstract

In this study, the effect of different ingredient proportions on the textural and hedonic characteristics of Vietnamese sausage was investigated. Vietnamese sausage is a widely popular traditional food of Vietnam, yet its characteristics are rarely investigated, especially the texture and hedonic properties. Vietnamese sausage’s texture was heavily influenced by three main ingredients: lean meat, lard and starch. In order to study the interactive effects of these three ingredients on texture as well as liking, eight samples with different proportions of these three main ingredients were prepared based on the mixture design approach. The textural characteristics (including hardness, cohesiveness, springiness, chewiness and gumminess) were determined using the texture profile analysis method, while a consumer panel (N = 70) evaluated their texture liking score. Surprisingly, all the texture characteristics were statistically significant difference. However, cohesiveness had a small variance between samples, signalling that this attribute is not important in describing the texture of Vietnamese sausage. To model the effect of ingredients, response surface regression with mixture model was carried out. The results showed that Scheffe’s special cubic model had a good fit for hardness (R2 = 0.946), chewiness (R2 = 0.902) while Scheffe’s quadratic model had a good fit for liking score (R2 = 0.967). The lean meat was found to be the ingredient with the largest effect on increasing the textural charactertistics as well as the liking score. Interestingly, upon inspecting the correlation between texture and liking score, the PCA map of both showed a similar structure. Finally, optimal values of the main ingredients for Vietnamese sausage formulations based on hedonic (> 6.5 liking score) were 4% - 8% starch, 70% - 76% lean meat and 18% - 26% lard. The analysis of consumers’ liking scores suggested that springiness is the main driver of liking for Vietnamese sausage products.