In Vitro Sensory Evaluation Of Chocolate Texture-Flavour Based On Bionic Mastication

With the improvement of living standards,people have put forward higher requirements for food,focusing on the enjoyment of food.The enjoyment of food is determined by human sensory perception,of which texture and flavour are the two basic elements that have a crucial impact on consumer acceptance of food.As one of the most popular food products,chocolate is loved by consumers of all ages because of its unique flavor and texture.Therefore,based on the mimetic function of the bionic instrument,an accurate and reasonable in vitro sensory evaluation method for two dimensions of chocolate texture and flavor is explored to provide a new reference perspective for the quality control of chocolate products.Through the use of analytical tools and sensory evaluation,a link between the two is established and objective characterization of sensory attributes is performed.The details are as follows:Mechanical loading based on instrumental measurements was performed to investigate the deformation behavior of chocolate.Uniaxial compression,cyclic loading,cutting fracture and creep tests were carried out using a mass spectrometer as a platform to measure the mechanical properties of chocolate during deformation and fracture stages.The stress-strain curves of the chocolate were analyzed,and the effects of the addition of ingredients were taken into account to analyze the causes of the changes in mechanical properties such as modulus of elasticity and fracture energy.Based on the mechanical characteristics of the chocolate,a four-component model was established to characterize the material properties of the chocolate reasonably and accurately by selecting a suitable combination of basic mechanical elements to fit and optimize the test data.Utilizing sophisticated technology including the electronic nose and GC-MS,the aroma of chocolate has been successfully detected and investigated.Our study has explored the response characterization of the electronic nose sensor,as well as the composition of volatile compounds responsible for the aroma of chocolate.Specifically,our analysis has revealed that the PEN3 electronic nose is able to identify different aromatic compounds through the measurement of conductivity changes in ten sensors.Notably,we have found that Sensor2,Sensor6,Sensor7,and Sensor9 exhibit a strong response to the aroma of chocolate.In addition,we have studied the aroma fingerprints of chocolate with varying ingredient proportions,using GC-MS technology to measure the composition of volatile compounds.Our results have shown that the major components of chocolate aroma are pyrazine and hydrocarbons.Furthermore,the proportion of pyrazine compounds is found to be relatively high in chocolate containing sugar,while the content of sulfur and ester compounds is elevated in chocolate containing milk.This observation may account for the changes in electronic nose sensor response.The in vitro sensory evaluation model of texture-flavor was established by mathematical and statistical methods based on the masticatory function combined with sensory evaluation.The mechanical behavior curves obtained from the mastication test were analyzed by using chocolate samples with different ratios,and four mechanical property indicators with high correlation with sensory perception were selected to establish the regression model of each texture attribute.By simulating the olfactory senses through the electronic nose,the detection of aroma release from chocolate chewing was linked to the sensory evaluation of flavor attributes,and the response value of the electronic nose sensor was used as a variable to achieve the prediction of each attribute score.Ten random samples were selected,and the output sensory attribute score predictions were calculated based on the selected instrumental measurements as input,and the relative errors between the sample predictions and the test values were recorded.The relative errors of the in vitro sensory evaluation models for multiple texture attributes and flavor attributes were less than 5%,and the models established by the bionic function had a high degree of fit.The proposed in vitro texture-flavor sensory evaluation method based on bionic chewing for chocolate not only selects bionic instruments similar to human sensory perception,but also takes into account the differences in sensory perception caused by different chewing behaviors of sensory evaluators,which improves the accuracy of sensory evaluation prediction and provides a reference for texture and flavor detection of other foods.Meanwhile,the combination of multiple bionic functions for food detection provides more dimensional information for food quality detection.