exemplifies the fat structure of fresh coconut milk
and homogenized coconut milk before and after sterilization.
In fresh coconut milk, the fat globules were of
variable size and non-uniformly dispersed with some aggregates.
The presence of finer and more uniform fat globule
size were exhibited after homogenization comparing with
the fresh sample. A good dispersion of fat globules in an
aqueous phase was clearly seen for the sample with 10%
sugar after homogenization. However, it was observed that
adding more concentration of coconut sugar resulted in the
aggregation of fat globules. Furthermore, the effect of
sugar concentration was more pronounced after sterilization.
The fat globules tended to move closer and formed
stronger structure of aggregates. At 30% sugar content,
the larger size of aggregates was exhibited with the more
unoccupied aqueous phase. Moreover, increasing Montanox
60 to 1.0% by fixing the concentration of CMC
resulted in an increase in aggregation of fat globules. Similar
results were also observed in the oil in water emulsion
system containing NaCl (Onsaard et al., 2005). Onsaard
et al. (2005) found that the extent of droplet aggregation
and creaming increased with an increase in NaCl concentration.
Moreover, heating may denature the adsorbed
proteins to undergo conformational changes. These conformational
changes could increase the attractive forces
between fat droplets which led to the aggregation