PROXIMATE AND MICROBIOLOGICAL QUALITIES OF FUNCTIONAL FRUIT JUICE FLAVOURED YOGHURT MADE FROM BOVINE MILK

Abstract

Yoghurt is a highly relished dairy product with wide global acceptance. In the production of yoghurt, synthetic flavourants are often used in improving its taste and flavour, however, this has created a lot of health concerns to the consumers. This study was conducted to investigated the quality of yoghurt produced using fruit juices as natural flavourants. Fresh cow’s milk was pasteurized at 80 ^oC for 3 minutes. The milk was thereafter cooled to 42 ^oC for inoculation. Reconstituted commercial strawberry flavour (T1) (synthetic flavour as control), fruit [coconut (T2), orange (T3) and pineapple (T4)] juices were added at 200mL in 1L each of the inoculated milk and incubated at 43 ^oC for 14 hours, and refrigerated for 14 days. The yoghurt samples were evaluated for physical and microbiological qualities at days 1, 7 and 14. Treatment effect indicated that moisture (84.27%), carbohydrate (9.66%) were highest in (T1) at day 1. Sample T4 had the highest fat (4.64%) and protein (6.83%) contents. It was generally observed that the microbial load count for yoghurt samples were at optimum (266.3-291.7 x103 cfu/mL) at day 1 of storage. The nutritional quality of yoghurt significantly (p<0.05) improved and microbial count observed was lower than the maximum international standard suggesting its wholesomeness for consumption.