Abstract:
Food additives play a huge role in food safety and development of various
food products. Stabilizers are one of the food additives which help in increasing the stability
as well as the viscosity of the food products. Stabilizers are found in almost all of the dairy
products, desserts and many beverages. In addition, food colours are added to different
types of foods to increase shelf life, visual attractiveness and to compensate for natural
colour variations. Food dyes utilized in colouring mostly come from natural or artificial
sources. The objectives of this study were to produce coconut ice cream using agar-agar
stabilizer, conduct a sensory evaluation by a panel of 20 people using Likert scale to see
the acceptability of the ice cream. Parameters like melting time and the presence of air
bubbles were observed after freezing of the ice cream. Based on the sensory evaluation,
for the overall acceptance of the ice cream a score of 9 was given. The results showed that
it had a melt run of 130s/g and many air bubbles were formed before and after freezing.
In the second part, a traditional Maldivian sweet known as “Ulhaali”was produced by
adding beetroot extract into its key ingredient coconut honey or “Dhiyaa hakuru”, and
ran a sensory evaluation of the product by a group of 15 participants, in terms of colour,
aroma and taste, in order to draw a conclusion regarding the acceptability of the addition
of the natural food colourant into the Maldivian sweet. Factors such as the colour retention
was observed before and after frying. From the results obtained for the sensory evaluation,
the product was highly accepted by the participants as all three descriptors received scores
of 8.5 and above out of 10, and after addressing the limitations, the success of the study
was rather high.
