Abstract
The present study used as an ingredient a commercial powdered food, which turns into gel-type blender gruel when stirred after the addition of hot water, to prepare samples. Different stirring conditions were used to prepare different samples. For each sample, the textural properties were measured as the physical properties, the physical properties were simply evaluated through the glass ring method, and the correlations with the results of “ease-of-eating” obtained from sensory evaluation were examined. When the samples using powdered gel-type blender gruel were heated (with the addition of hot water) and stirred frequently for preparation, the gel structure was inhibited. These samples turned soft, both at sample temperatures of 45℃ and 20℃. Meanwhile, the adhesiveness was affected to different degrees by the stirring frequency, depending on the temperature to which the samples had been heated during preparation. The measurements using the glass ring method revealed that samples that were stirred more frequently during preparation demonstrated larger spreading coefficient and weight of adhering to the glass ring used for measurement. Hence, the gel-type blender gruel samples possessing those characteristics were evaluated to be soft, sticky, and relatively hard to swallow. These results suggest that the ease-of-eating of gel-type food (within a hardness range of 1×103 to 1.5×104 N/m2) can be inferred by the glass ring method of measurement. Taking into account the results of the present study, which demonstrated differences in the correlation between the adhesiveness of textural properties and the stickiness obtained from sensory evaluation depending on the sample temperature, the authors confirmed the necessity of developing a method of measuring the textural property of adhesiveness that can appropriately indicate the “easeof-eating”of samples.
