Colloids in Milk Products

Abstract

Food, especially milk, is such a familiar material to all of us that it is easy to overlook the scientific input required to assure the quality of existing milk products and/or to come up with new and better processed dairy foods. A major input comes from the research fields of Colloid and Interface science and Soft Condensed Matter Physics, since it becomes more and more evident that relevant properties of foods, such as texture, taste, color, viscosity, stability, mouth-feel or nutritional functionality, are not simply the result of the presence of the ingredients mixed together during processing, but are also the result of the created three-dimensional structure. Recognizing that food materials can be described as colloidal systems allows food technologists to better control the quality of the end product. In the present work we discuss how colloidal concepts can be used to describe the behavior of milk products. We will consider the colloidal properties of milk characterized by the properties of its colloidal entities, i.e. the fat globules, the casein micelles and the whey protein aggregates.