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The market of ripened cheese is growing rapidly and is highly competitive. Dairy manufacturers have expanded their product range to include cheese-like products where milk fat is replaced with vegetable oils. Cheese-like products have gained popularity among both convenient food producers and consumers looking for cheaper cheese substitutes. Fat determines the sensory attributes of cheeses. The sensory quality of cheese can also be modified through the addition of selected adjunct cultures. This study evaluated the influence of milk fat replacement with palm oil and the addition of an adjunct culture of Lactobacillus paracasei LPC-37 on the sensory attributes of Dutch-type cheeses and cheese-like products during ripening. The chemical composition, content of volatile compounds and colour were analysed. The replacement of milk fat with palm oil contributed to differences in the sensory profile and colour of cheese-like products and deteriorated their sensory quality. However, the addition of L. paracasei LPC-37 improved the sensory characteristics of cheese-like products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates maternal practices as class practices and the role of consumption during motherhood and addresses the practices and tastes of mothers in the context of the construction and reproduction of class differences in society. We define class as an interaction achievement and we assume that maternal practices are nowadays together with other practices of everyday life closely intertwined in the creation of distinctions and, thus, in social differentiation. The article is based on in-depth interviews with mothers on various social positions and with different amount of acquired cultural capital in order to sketch differences in class practices of motherhood and to illustrate how through everyday concerns, choices and practices that specifically relate to maternity, symbolic differentiation is produced. In an empirical study, with a comparison between material and formal aesthetics, the demonstration of materialism and idealism, and the local and cosmopolitan taste, we illustrate how differences in cultural capital of informants/mothers structure their patterns of tastes. In general, we find out that mothers with young children belonging to different social classes, have different patterns of social taste and cultural consumption, what is reflected also in their different lifestyles. With concrete examples we highlight how, in the time of early motherhood, class differences are reproduced in everyday life and, above all, through everyday consumer choices, and we recognize the significance of maternity practices as an important field for the construction and maintenance of class divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taste plays an essential role in food selection and consequently overall nutrition. Our sense of taste helps us to gain information to form a picture of the world by sampling chemicals from our environment. Till now five basic taste modalities have been elucidated: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami, however in last years also fatty acid taste is perhaps becoming six scent of taste and existence of more basic tastes is still under debate. Each of these basic tastes has distinct functions. Umami and sweet taste are caloric detectors, eliciting positive hedonic tone, salt taste is important in maintaining sodium levels and is especially important in herbivores, sour taste contributes to recognition of unripe and spoiled food and bitter taste is assumed to detect toxins in the food. We can sense sweet (carbohydrates) and umami (proteins), therefore it would be sensibly to expect that we can sense fat. Each of the taste modalities is eliciting responses through its type of receptors, which are located in different taste buds, on different papillae in diverse areas of the tongue and its surroundings and influencing different nerves to activate taste recognition. Different channels and receptors, including seven transmembrane receptors (7TM receptors) on their own or by group effort, on example heterodimerization, are involved in taste perception by triggering diverse signaling pathways simultaneously in parallel or diametrically. This article reviews all by now known taste modalities from anatomical basis of taste perception till molecular mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]