Pumpkin seeds in the simulation of craft cheeses with a given fatty acid composition

The aim of the work was to study the possibility of modeling fatty acid composition of craft cheeses by adding pumpkin seeds. The research problems were to determine the fatty acid composition of pumpkin seeds, to make the samples of craft cheese with their different content, to determine the fatty acid composition, to evaluate organoleptic characteristics of the samples, as well as possible losses of biologically valuable mono- and polyunsaturated fatty acids in the process of making cheese samples. The study was carried out on the samples of craft cheese “Kachotta”, produced at scientific and innovative production laboratory LacCor of the Institute of Food Production of Krasnoyarsk State Agrarian University. The analysis of the fatty acid composition of pumpkin seeds, as well as cheese samples, was carried out by gas chromatography. 16 fatty acids were found in the oil of pumpkin seeds used in the experiment: marginal acids account for 18.24 % of the total weight of all detected acids, unsaturated acids - 81.76 %, including polyunsaturated acids account for more than 50 %. Expert evaluation of the organoleptic parameters of the cheese samples showed that using the pumpkin seeds in the range from 1.67 to 8.30 % did not worsen the taste qualities of the cheese. It was shown the pumpkin seeds could be used to enrich the fatty acid composition of craft cheese with such biologically valuable non-distributed fatty acids as octadecene and linoleic. At the same time, the content of minor acids (for example, α-linolenic acid), taking into account the error of the analysis method, practically had not changed. In the course of the study, the losses of unsaturated fatty acids contained in the seeds detected when the seeds had been introduced into the cheese composition at the stage of filling the cheese grain into molds had been less than 10 %. It had been concluded that the pumpkin seeds could be used to model the content of those unsaturated fatty acids in craft cheese, the mass fraction of which in the seeds significantly exceeded 1 %.