27-07-2011

The meeting was held on 27th of July’2011 with Dr. Chenand Dr. Ho. And it was called by Lili Zhai and recorder the meeting minutes aswell. Due to analyse the shelf life of product, so we should think about physicaltexture such as crispiness on our product, then Dr. Chen gave us some importantsuggestions which methods we should use.
 * Meeting minutes **

The thick layer of samosa would affect texture. We can put thewhole products under the machine to measure interval the change of texture.However, it will be difficult for us. The other method is that we destroy thewhole cooked product, and then take a portion including the filling and pastry,placing the instrument to analyse. For testing the crispiness of pastry, we canuse the machine like this:  ]

Just our product pastry replaces biscuit. A weighted probe (theload cell) moves at constant speed through the sample. The force exerted bypastry of sample on the cell and the distance moved by the probe are measured.At the same time the sound output from the sample is measured with a microphone.The pastry of each our product shall be tested 4 or 5 times, and then get theaverage results.

As the probe moves through the pastry, many sound pulses areemitted. Sound pulses arise from when the pastry fractures. There is a lot ofnoise. From the test, we can get the graphs between force and time and sound.

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﻿Thus we can use this method to test the pastry shelf life ofproducts. However, we should think about the time gap between slide samosasfrom oven and do the test. Because moisture content affects the crispiness ofpastry, when samoses are taken out from oven after baking, the moisture of airaffects the texture of pasty, making it more powdery.

When we had a meeting with Dr. Ho, he told us to search someinformation about the factor of shelf life and how our product can be changedin the shelf life. He mentioned a method called estimated shelf life. We canstore samosas for a period. Then we can take samosas out from freezer, cookthem. Ask some assessors to smell our products like filling, and observe theappearance of products like the pastry colour.

We also need to check out how to calculate peroxide value.  Back to Unit 4 meeting minutes