Development of Fermented Millet Sprout Milk Beverage Based on Physicochemical Property Studies and Consumer Acceptability Data

Abstract

Millets play an important role in the food and nutritional security of the poor in arid and semiarid regions of the world. The present study focused on the use of underexploited millets for production of fermented millet based milk beverage. The beverage was prepared using skimmed milk along with three different millets (finger millet, pearl millet and sorghum). The techniques used for processing millets are soaking, sprouting and extraction of milk from millets. The ratio of millet milk blending with skimmed milk was optimized using Mixture Design based on physicochemical properties viz., sediment, viscosity, wheying off, acidity and sensory responses. The overall acceptability of the optimized sample was 7.1, which is very close to the predicted value. The nutritional analysis was done for the sample prepared using optimized combination of millet milk.