In: Chemistry
How would you expect the elimination of alcohol from the Mojonnier procedure to affect the results? why?
Ethanol or ethyl alcohol is an important constituent in Mojonnier procedure for quantitative fat content determination of food.
Ethanol (96 vol%) acts as anti-gelling compound and as the name suggests, prevents gel formation during the estimation. It is added to the denaturated sample prior to the first couple of extraction steps.
If you did not use a neutral solvent like ethanol, and instead used :
1. Acidic solvent : This would mean that you get higher FFA content than the actual.
2. Basic solvent :If you used basic solvents, you will get lower FFA content than the actual.
That's because the solvent would hinder with the titration giving you an incorrect titre value.
Hence ethanol serves 2 purposes:
a. Anti-gelling compound
b. Does not alter titre value