Study of the aroma of artificially flavoured custards by chemical sensor array fingerprinting

It is generally known that the chemical analysis of the volatile compounds of foods is not adequate todescribe the complexity of flavours; as a consequence, sensory analysis is the fundamental methodologyto determine quality and acceptability of food products. Nonetheless, instrumental estimations of humanreactions to food are still highly demanded. To this regard the synthetic and qualitative representation ofdata originated by multivariate instruments has gained importance in the last years. In particular, fingerprintsfromchemical sensor arrays have been a subject of investigation aimed at developing instrumentalmeasurements of human olfactory perceptions.In this paper, a study case on the application of a sensor array aimed at appraising the flavour propertiesof custard desserts seasoned with strawberry aroma is presented. These studies were intended to determinethe effects of some key ingredients (milk fat content and sugar type) to the aroma and to the aromatemporal decay under controlled storage. Sensor data have been compared and complemented with thoseprovided by gas-chromatography and sensory analysis. The results indicate that custard headspace fingerprintingcan obviously recognize the addition of artificial flavours, and, more noteworthy, discriminateamong fat milk content and sugar types used to prepare the samples. Furthermore, composition wasalso found to affect the temporal evolution of aroma evidencing distinct paths in a principal componentanalysis (PCA) score plot for samples prepared with different ingredients.[...]