PALM OIL AND SOYBEAN OIL AS FRY FATS - SENSORY ACCEPTABILITY OF A DEEP-FAT FRIED NIGERIAN SNACK FOOD

The objective of the project was to compare the acceptability of a African snack product, chin-chin, when fried in soybean, palm, palm olein and palm stearin oils. Forty complete responses were obtained from volunteer judges who were attending an agricultural exposition sponsored by the University of Nebraska. After tasting all products, the judges gave slightly better rating scores to the palm stearin fried chin-chin than to the soybean oil fried products (p < 0.10) with the palm olein and palm oil fried products being given intermediate scores. The forced ranking evaluation gave directionally similar results but, because of smaller variation among scores, these differences were significantly different at the p < 0.05 level. Since differences in acceptability scores were very small, these results suggest that improvement in nutritional value achieved by feeding a less saturated oil (soybean oil) may be worth the slight decline in taste/odor acceptability in comparison to a more highly saturated fry fat (palm olein oil).