Estimation of rheological properties of gelato by FT-NIR spectroscopy

The control of gelato powder mixture production usually is carried out evaluating the gelato liquid phase. The rheological measurements from the present study were conduced on gelato unfrozen liquid phase in order to indirectly evaluate its rheological properties by FT-NIR spectroscopy applied on gelato powders. The calibration set was composed by samples obtained from different recipes having increasing percentage of thickeners, maintaining the proportions of the others compounds constant. After the NIR acquisitions the powders were mixed with warm milk, blended and than settled in order to obtain the unfrozen liquid phase needed for the rheological measurements. For each of the 60 tested recipes three batches with the same thickeners concentration were prepared. The flow curves were obtained with a rotational viscosimeter and were evaluated by using the Ostwald de Waele’s equation and the goodness of fit was evaluated by the R2, which was above 0.95. Predictive models of rheological parameters were set up by means of PLS regressions in order to predict the apparent viscosity (η), the consistency coefficient (K) and the flow behaviour index (n) from spectral acquisitions. A high correlation of calibration was found between NIR spectra and apparent viscosity with R2 of 0.943. A good correlation was also found between the NIR spectra and the consistency coefficient (K) and flow behaviour index (n), with a determination coefficient (R2) of 0.895 and 0.874, respectively.The good prediction of the models encourages applying them to reduce significantly the time of the powder mixing control during production.