Multi Grain Ice Cream – A nutritional enrichment approach

Introduction

Humans need a wide range of nutrients to lead a healthy and active life. A well balanced diet will give the essential nutrients. The nutrient requirement of an individual and the dietary allowances for a group or a population are distinctly different. Availability and affordability of such minimum quantum and quality of various ingredients of an adequate and balanced diet’ on a regular basis, backed by health and educational services in an environmentally sustainable scenario will then enable each individual personality getting an opportunity to flower to one’s full potential.

Why Ice Cream ?

Ice-cream is having a peak demand during the summer months. Everyone loves ice cream. Or almost everyone, anyway! Peoples love for ice cream has come a long way back. In India, Ice Cream sales increased by 13% per year over the past five years, the fastest growth in the world. We can widening variety of flavours, textures, and formats. This fact necessitated to attempt on making Ice cream enriching with nutrients to fulfil the nutritional demand kids and adults.

Preparation of Ice Cream

1. Mix the cereals, millets and pulses and clean them.
2. Later sort and grind to flour. (it is the main component for preparing Ice-cream).
3. This blended dried powder serves as a source of protein, dietary fibre, iron and B Vitamins thus retaining all the goodness of nature’s bounty ensuring quality.
4. Mix the Fresh, raw (cow and buffalo) milk and Use the skim milk powder was as the base material for the ice cream manufacture.
5. In addition, Use the commercial grade cane sugar, Sodium alginate (stabilizer) and commercial grade Glycerol Mono Stearate (GMS) (emulsifier), Cocoa (flavouring agent).
6. Later, Malt the Multi grain powder.
7. Gelatinise the multi grain flour (roasted in butter) with whole milk at different rates viz. 10, 15 and 20 % (w/w) 100 parts whole milk and 15 parts.
8. Later, Mix the multi grain flour and heat to 90 °C for no hold the mix showed good gel characteristics. Hence, Select a level of 6.0 % milk fat and 11.5 % SNF for preparation of mix.  
9. Add Sugar, sodium alginate and glycerol monostearate at the rate of 15, 0.25 and 0.2 % respectively in all the mixes.
10. Pasteurise the mixture at 85 degree Celsius for 5 minutes followed by cooling at 50 degree Celsius and homogenise the mixture is for 5 minutes and subject to Aging for 24 hours. 
11. Finally, freeze the Product mixture for 15minutes and harden at 24 degree Celsius and store at 32⁰C.

Results and Conclusion

A medium fat (6 % milk fat) Multi grain ice cream can be prepared using pre-treated malted Multi grain flour. Among different flavours, Chocolate flavoured Multi grain ice cream was preferred more. Heat shock treatment as well as storage up to 30 days had no adverse effect on the quality of the chocolate flavoured Ragi ice cream on the basis of the overall acceptability score.