BROWNING, ITS CHEMISTRY AND IMPLICATIONS IN DAIRY PRODUCTS: A REVIEW

Browning- one of the major chemical reaction taking place during processing and storage of food, leads to several changes in the products in terms of colour, flavour, loss of nutritive value, formation of toxic compounds, loss of solubility, along with some desirable aroma and flavour compounds etc. These changes have been induced due to several factors like type of amino acid, type of sugar, temperature, pH, etc. Several studies have been carried out on different dairy products depicting the desirable and undesirable effect of browning on milk powder, infant formulae, pizza cheese, sweet whey powder, confectionaries and bakery products. As browning in some cases causes the formation of some toxic and mutagenic compounds in some cases, it is important to control or minimize it. This can be done by controlling temperature, water activity and pH, high pressure processing, modified atmospheric packaging and also by use of some chemical inhibitors