Stability of Whey Protein Concentrate/Sunflower Oil Emulsions as Affected by Sucrose and Xanthan Gum

The effect of the addition of sucrose and xanthan gum, protein concentration, and processing method on the stability and destabilization mechanism type of emulsions formulated with two commercial whey protein concentrate powders was described and quantified following system changes with a Turbiscan TMA 2000, a light scattering equipment and a confocal laser scanning microscope. Two different processing methods that gave particle sizes with different orders of magnitude were compared: homogenization by ULTRA-TURRAX (UT) and by ultrasound (US). The addition of sucrose to the aqueous phase of emulsions significantly diminished volume-weighted mean diameter (D (4,3)) and improved stability. When the aqueous phase contained xanthan gum, the main destabilization mechanism for UT emulsions changed from creaming to flocculation. For US emulsions, although some aggregation was detected by confocal laser scanning microscopy, it was not great enough to modify the backscattering average (BSav) in the middle zone of the tube (20-50 mm). At low protein concentrations, the profiles corresponded to destabilization of small aggregates. In those conditions, creaming was markedly enhanced as evident from creaming rate values. Independently of aqueous phase composition, US emulsions stabilized by protein concentrations higher than 5 wt% were stable, indicating that whey proteins were good emulsion stabilizers at pH close to 7. This study shows the relevance of protein type on stability and describes for the first time a behavior for whey proteins different from the one reported for caseins in literature.