Sensory and instrumental assessment of Chinese moon cake: Influences of almond flour, maltitol syrup, fat, and gums

The objectives of this research were to investigate sensory and instrumental (texture and color) quality attributes and their relation of newly formulated Chinese moon cakes: California almond flour and maltitol syrup were used as the replacement of wheat flour and sucrose syrup, respectively and gum was added as the fat-replacer. Sensory analysis showed that addition of almond flour had the most significant (P ⩽ 0.05) effects on the properties of moon cakes, and the 70% replaced moon cake was most favored by the sensory panel: almond flavor, color, shininess, stickiness, oiliness, and chewiness increased and hardness decreased. Sweetness and moon cake color decreased significantly as maltitol syrup replaced sucrose syrup. The reduction of fat decreased shininess, stickiness, and oiliness but the addition of gums alleviated the impaired attributes. The instrumental data were highly correlated with those from the sensory analysis for hardness, chewiness, and stickiness (R2 = 0.97, 0.96, and 0.71, respectively).