Instant Cereal-Based Fermented Beverage (Boza) Powder: Characterization Physical, Rheological and Structural Properties

Abstract

Boza is a traditional lactic acid and yeast-fermented beverage. Boza has a short shelf life of up to 15 days, due to the presence of viable microbiota. Spray drying was performed to extend the shelf life. Spray-dried powders have poor reconstitution and instant properties that may restrict consumption. To overcome this problem, the fluidized bed agglomeration process was used for the first time to improve the quality of boza powders. Spray-dried boza powders were agglomerated in a fluidized bed agglomerator using sucrose binder. The optimum process conditions for obtaining samples with minimum moisture content, wettability time, angle of repose and maximum LAB number, particle size, solubility, porosity values were determined as 73.92 degrees C air inlet temperature, 0.7 bar atomization pressure and 22.67 mL binder amount (desirability: 0.87). Under these conditions, the number of LAB decreased by about 2 log units. At the optimum point, boza powder showed instant wetting behavior with 28.3 s wetting time while it was 99.33 in spray-dried form. Instant boza powder was categorized as having low cohesiveness and good flowability with an 11.62 degrees angle of repose value, while it was 36.44 degrees in spray-dried form. The loss modulus (G '') was lower than the storage modulus (G ') at all applied angular frequencies (omega), indicating the elastic properties of the reconstituted instant boza. Agglomeration technology has a strong potential to solve the dilution problems of boza powder and enable the production of boza products that can be consumed at all times of the year.