In commercial products, more complex flavouring ingredients
like herbs and spices are used and the purpose of this paper was
to establish the feasibility of using marker compounds for the
spices used in curry sauce production to rebalance the desired curry
flavour in reduced-fat analogues of the regular fat product (10 g
oil/100 g sauce). Headspace analysis of the spice ingredients was
used to choose marker compounds and the release of the markers
was measured in the regular and low fat products using the
MSNose technique (online APCI–MS (Taylor & Linforth, 2010)). Release
models were constructed from regression analysis and the
amount of spices reformulated so as to match aroma release in
the regular and reduced fat products. The hypothesis was that, because
most of the aroma compounds in the spices used to flavour
curry sauce are hydrophobic and have similar hydrophobicity values
(log P), then monitoring the release of a single marker compound
would allow effective reformulation of the spice
component rather than measuring the release of each and every aroma
component in the spices. The match was confirmed by
MSNose and sensory analysis of the overall curry sauce flavour,
thus demonstrating the success of this approach when using complex
biological flavour ingredients, rather than pure flavour
compounds.