Relationship of Physicochemical Characteristics with Sensory Profile of Cookies Enriched with Medicinal Herbs

In this work, a range of model cookies enriched with different quantities of medicinal herbs, applied in two forms (pulverized mixture and extract), were studied to compare and describe relationships between physicochemical and sensory data. Multivariate statistical methods were applied to estimate relationships in the analyzed data. Analysis of variance showed that the majority of analyzed parameters were highly significant in discriminating among the samples (p < 0.05), which supported the usefulness of their application in characterizing the quality profile of enriched cookies. Principal component analysis on physicochemical data revealed that cookies at the same enrichment level showed more similarities. Principal component analysis on sensory data exhibited a larger separation between the samples with increasing enrichment levels, especially in the case of pulverized herbal mixture. According to partial least squares regression, two significant partial least squares components explained 92.7% and predicted 78.0% variation in the data. The most important parameters in discriminating between the cookies enriched with medicinal herbs were lightness, red tonality, and hardness. The selected physicochemical parameters could be used in future studies to evaluate variously enriched cookies by establishing models and investigating the predictability of sensory quality.