Today, we are talking functional foods, i.e. food that has added functions such as disease prevention or health promoting benefits.
One such example is probiotics, otherwise known as friendly bacteria, that seem to be good for your gut. But what happens when you want probiotics but without the dairy component? Two alternatives are soy and coconut “milks”. Both of which perform well as yogurts, i.e. they can be fermented with the good bacteria, but what about making them into frozen yogurt?
A paper published in the International Journal of Dairy Technology addresses this problem. The researchers made various mixes of cow’s milk, coconut milk and soya milk, then fermented them into yogurt and froze them in a domestic ice cream maker. They then evaluated the mixes by looking at their eating qualities and the number of friendly bacteria still alive.
They found that overall people rated the 100% cow milk frozen yogurt as being the tastiest and the 100% soy milk frozen yogurt scored the least. The composites had various levels of negative attributes such as being “more unnatural, dull in colour and appearance, gummier in texture and poor in flavour.” On the plus side, the use of coconut milk and soy milk actually increased the survival of the probiotics compared to cow’s milk.
Looks like they may need to tweak their recipes a bit before going commercial, or perhaps stop at the yogurt stage.