The doce de leite is an important regional food produced and consumed in large scale in Brazil and Argentina. There are many problems related to the quality standardization, mainly the excess of starch addition. In the present paper the sensory evaluation of samples produced in the laboratory containing known amounts of starch and two commercial samples with 1.0 and 7.6% of starch was performed. The ranking test was employed for preference evaluation of the laboratory samples. An acceptance test using an hedonic scale was carried out with 50 panelists that evaluated the samples by considering their color, consistency, taste and sweetness. The commercial samples were evaluated through an action scale. For the samples produced in the laboratory there was no significant difference for preference (p>0.05) in the ranking test and for the preference by attributes it was possible to conclude that the less sweet samples and with intermediary values of color and consistency were preferred. The commercial sample containing 1.0% of starch had an average acceptance of 6.7 whereas the other sample that contained 7.6% of starch had 4.9.
starch; doce de leite; sensory evaluation
