Use of Kefir in Cheese Ball Production: Physicochemical, Textural, Rheological, and Sensory Properties

In this study, kefir was transformed into edible cheese balls with improved physicochemical, sensory, nutritional, and functional properties in hopes of increasing consumer diversity. For this purpose, kefir was concentrated with a solid-liquid centrifuge machine. We produced the cheese balls by mixing concentrated kefir and white cheese in the ratios of 0:100 (K0), 25:75 (K25), 50:50 (K50), 75:25 (K75), and 100:0 (K100) and characterized them in terms of their physicochemical, textural, rheological, and sensory properties. We found that the group with the highest values in terms of dry matter, protein, energy, pH, <i>b</i>*, chroma (<i>C</i>*), hardness, and gumminess values was K100, followed by K75, and the lowest values, except for the hardness value, were K0. The results showed that the cheese ball samples exhibited viscoelastic solid and non-Newtonian character, and K100 and K25 had the highest storage modulus (<i>G</i>') and complex viscosity (<i>η</i>*) values. K75 sample was found to have the lowest <i>G</i>' and viscous modulus (<i>G</i>″) values. We found that K100 demonstrated the highest scores in terms of color-appearance (4.51), structure-consistency (4.23) and general acceptability (4.18) criteria on a 5-point hedonic scale (1 = very bad and 5 = very good). K75 (4.15) was the most liked group in the taste-odor criteria, followed by K100 (4.13). The use of concentrated kefir in cheese ball production increased the dry matter, protein, carbohydrate, energy, pH, gumminess values, and all sensory evaluation scores of the samples. The study concluded that concentrated kefir can be used alone or mixed with white cheese in different proportions in cheese ball production, resulting in the nutritional value and sensory properties of the product increase.