Kheer, a cereal based dessert containing rice, milk and sugar as major ingredients, is very popular in India and South East Asian countries. A process for manufacturing a dairy dessert based on pearl millet and milk as main ingredients was optimized. During the investigation, the effect of different levels of dairy whitener and pearl millet, and temperature was studied by employing a 3 factor central composite rotatable design version 7.1.6. The best formulation with 18.49% dairy whitener and 6.0% pearl millet and a process temperature of 87.5 °C yielded 46.76% of the product on the basis of the dairy whitener used. This formulation was found to be most appropriate for manufacture of pearl millet-based kheer with predicted scores of 7.62, 7.05, 7.32, 6.97, 6.95 and 7.29 for grain to liquid ratio, consistency, sweetness, grain texture, flavour and overall acceptability respectively.
Keywords: Dairy dessert; Pearl millet; Response surface methodology.