Physico-chemical properties of ready to reconstitute carrot flavoured milk beverage

Spray drying is a novel technique for production of dried milk powders to enhance the storage life of milk and making it convenient to reconstitute without much loss of nutrients. A study was conducted to develop a ready to reconstitute milk beverage by using the spray drying technology with optimum physico-chemical and nutritional parameters. Ready to reconstitute milk beverage was prepared by incorporation of 20 per cent level of carrot extract and 1.5 per cent level of cardamom with varying levels of milk fat at 3, 4.5, 1.5 and 0.5 per cent as Control, T1, T2 and T3. Further, the selected treatments and control were subjected to spray drying technology with standardized spray drying parameters and packed in polyethylene bags and stored at room temperature for 120 days during which the physico-chemical properties were studied on day 0, 30, 60, 90 and 120. The mean ± SE values for pH, titrable acidity and solubility index of different treatments of ready to reconstitute milk beverage ranged from 6.68 ± 0.02 to 6.74 ± 0.03, 0.176 ± 0.02 to 0.185 ± 0.04 and 0.67 ± 0.011 to 0.83 ± 0.017 respectively. It was concluded that ready to reconstitute milk beverage can be prepared by using skim milk (0.5 per cent milk fat), carrot extract 20 per cent and cardamom 1.5 per cent with standardized parameters of spray drying technology as input feed rate at 8RPM, inlet temperature at 185.0 °C for set1 and 195.0 °C for set 2, outlet temperature at 102.5 °C for set1 and 105.5 °C for set 2 and with good physico-chemical properties within the prescribed standards.