The development of burfi sweetened with aspartame

Sucrose was successfully replaced with the sweetener aspartame for the preparation of the indigenous dairy product burfi . Analytical conditions were standardised for the solid phase extraction of aspartame and its degradation products from burfi followed by their reverse phase HPLC. Recovery using this method was 90–97%. Aspartame at a level of 0.065% of milk w/w scored highest in terms of sweetness perception and resembled control burfi in sweetness. Storage studies at 6–8°C revealed that aspartame-sweetened burfi resembled the control burfi in retaining the sensory profile, but showed an increase in acidity and microbial load and could not retain the texture. High-performance liquid chromatography analysis revealed no degradation of aspartame in burfi , establishing its stability and hence its sweetness on storage.     

Magnetic resonance in superparamagnetic zinc ferrite

In the present work, we have synthesized zinc ferrite nanoparticles by nitrate method. Presence of almost zero value of coercivity and remanence in the hysteresis of these samples shows the superparamagnetic nature at room temperature. Electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy performed on these samples in the temperature range 120–300 K indicates the systematic variation of the line-shapes of the spectra with temperature. Both g-value and peak-to-peak linewidth decrease with increase in temperature. The variation of g-values and peak-to-peak linewidth with temperature has been fitted with existing models and we observed different values of activation energies of the spins for both the samples.