Rheology and sensorial properties in traditional and plant-based (vegan) shortbread

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Mohamed, Khalifa and Jenkins, Peter and Oliveira, Mónica S. N. and Simmchen, Juliane (2025) Rheology and sensorial properties in traditional and plant-based (vegan) shortbread. Physics of Fluids, 37 (3). 037195. ISSN 1089-7666 (https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0255346)

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Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine the suitability of using plant-based alternatives to dairy butter in a model product of a high fat content, Scottish shortbread. We study this well-known Scottish product from the viewpoint of replacing dairy-based butter with a plant-based (vegan) alternative. This widely known and loved baked good has a large content of butter, which is considered crucial for its sensorial and structural properties and thus serves as an ideal product to test butter replacements. We consider three commercially available plant-based alternatives and a generic dairy butter in terms of their fat composition, melting behavior, and corresponding dough properties. Their behavior from a rheological perspective is tested to determine how their different compositions lead to changes in their responses to oscillatory stresses. Finally, after baking the different doughs, we obtained different shortbread versions and designed a sensorial test associated with a survey to investigate their human perception. Based on these results, two of the three plant-based alternatives perform similarly to dairy-based butter. These two alternatives, vegan alternative 2 (VA2) and vegan alternative 3 (VA3), had a total fat percentage of 70% and 79% compared to dairy butter's 82%. Additionally, their rheological properties, such as storage and elastic moduli, are closer to the values of dairy butter, and the firmness of the doughs at room temperature are also similar. Thus, the final baked products using VA2 and VA3 alternatives performed indistinguishably from their dairy butter counterpart by the survey's participants and can be considered as replacements in the future without detriment to flavor or texture.

ORCID iDs

Mohamed, Khalifa, Jenkins, Peter ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3888-2155, Oliveira, Mónica S. N. ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1836-4692 and Simmchen, Juliane ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9073-9770;
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)