The Relationship Between the Rheological and Sensory Properties of a Lemon Pie Filling

A range of lemon pie fillings containing the ingredients corn starch, sugar, egg yolk, lemon juice and water were prepared using a constant weight mixture design. There were five ingredients in the system and four ratio variables were employed resulting in 25 formulations. Dynamic rheological and sensory measurements were performed. The latter used magnitude estimation to evaluate the characteristics of thickness, sweetness and lemon flavour. The relationship between the complex viscosity (η*) and perceived thickness was in good agreement with previous work on simpler model systems. Perceived sweetness showed a greater decrease than perceived lemon flavour with increased viscosity. The decrease in sweetness with increasing viscosity increased with increasing sucrose concentration, but was less than has been observed for systems thickened by random coil polysaccharides. An attempt has been made to explain this in terms of solution structure.