Sensory evaluation
Results of sensory evaluation are shown in Tables 3 and 4.
As it has been reported previously by other authors (Vickers,
1985; Spence, 2015), what we hear while eating plays an
important role in our perception of the textural properties of
food. Indeed, the sounds that are generated while biting into or
chewing food provide a rich source of information about the
textural properties of that which is being consumed (Spence,
2015). In case of dry products (like the snacks developed in
this work), the sound come from the rupture of void cells and
the air release.
As can be seen in Table 3, granule snack obtained the
highest score in crispness and crackliness, additionally the
global evaluation value of this sample was not significantly
different from the reference product. Values obtained for yolk
and plasma snacks did not differ significantly between them,
whereas the scores of these samples were significantly
different from those of granule snack. As it is shown in
Table 4, a link between sound score and moisture content can
be observed, in fact, the more the amount of water content the
lower the score that was obtained in the global evaluation of
sound. Hence, it is important to obtain sufficiently dried snacks
in order to contribute positively to its organoleptic properties.
Regarding the evaluation of the other different attributes
and, as can be seen in Table 5, plasma snack obtained the best
score in colour, flavour and odour, whereas in hardness it was
evaluated with the lowest score. Furthermore it should be
pointed out that granule snack hardness was the only attribute
that differed significantly from the attributes of the other
samples. In all cases, general evaluation of the products was
near to 3 (the medium value of the scale), additionally there
were not significant differences between the samples in this
evaluation. Thus, the developed products, mainly in the case of
granule snacks, have shown to be an interesting base product
for the development of different suitable applications.