Sensory, functional, and analytical comparisons of whey butter with other butters

The objective of this work was to characterize the sensory attributes of whey (WB), cultured (CB), and regular sweet cream (SB) unsalted butters produced at the Dairy Products Technology Center (experimental; n = 3) or obtained from commercial sources (n = 6). Nine judges were trained for nine 1-h sessions; they then rated samples on a 15-cm line scale in triplicate using descriptive analysis. Data obtained were analyzed using SAS statistical software. Significant differences between the 3 types of butters were obtained on yellow, shiny, acidic odor, melt rate, porous, hard, spreadable, cheese odor, mouthcoating, nutty, cardboard odors, acidic, nutty, diacetyl, and grassy flavors. Cultured butter and SB were significantly shinier than WB. Whey butter was more yellow than CB, which in turn was more yellow than SB. Whey butter was more porous, and had higher scores on nutty flavor and cardboard odor than SB and CB. Sweet cream butter was significantly harder than CB but not WB. Cultured butter had more mouthcoating, acidic odor and flavor, and grassy flavor than SB and WB. The commercial samples were more porous, crumbly, and had significantly more artificial butter odor, rancid odor, and flavor. Results from principal component analysis indicated that experimental WB and SB were similar and were characterized by a sweet taste. Whey butter's characteristics compared favorably with commercial CB and were very similar to sweet cream butter. No major significant differences were obtained for triangle tests, with the exception of that for WB and CB in pound cake. No significant differences were obtained for the acceptability of the different versions of any of the 3 foods.