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Description
Flavored yogurt which includes fruit yogurt is more popular with consumers, the addition of fruit to yogurt improves the flavor making the yogurt product more appealing to consumers. Dragon fruit has been used in yogurt production to enhance the nutritional and physiological characteristics of the final product. However, limited information exists on optimizing the processing parameters of dragon fruit yogurt production. This study,therefore, adopted a central composite design to optimize the processing parameters of dragon fruit yogurt production and evaluated the statistical relation between the independent factors (dragon fruit puree, milk powder, corn starch, and fermentation time) and their responses (viscosity, syneresis, pH and titratable acidity). Results indicated that milk powder and fermentation time were the principal factors that affect the various responses. Based on the surface response models, the optimum formulation conditions for dragon fruit yogurt were dragon fruit puree (31.42 g), corn starch (7.0 g), milk powder (49.02 g), and fermentation time (6.0 hr). This produced a measured response of pH (4.77 ± 0.12), viscosity (30.33 ± 9.29 cP), syneresis (25.24 ± 5.36%), and titratable acidity (1.05 ± 0.03 %). The optimum fermentation conditions had a favorable effect on the response values, suggesting that dragon fruit yogurt production could benefit from the optimized formula.