Microbiological quality of khoa samples marketed in Deulgaon raja tehsil of Buldhana district of Maharashtra state

The present investigation was carried out to study the popular indigenous concentrated milk product i.e. khoa. It is a compact mass of very small uniformly sized granules. It is white in color (slight brown) has a sweet taste and a pleasant odour. It keeps well for 2–3 days in hot weather and 4–5 days in cold weather. For this investigation a total 50 samples of milk khoa from the ten villages were collected aseptically and subjected to further analysis of standard plate count, coliform count, yeast and mould count and isolation, identification of mould species. The samples were analyzed for microbiological analysis, viz. standard plate count using method as per Indian standards and yeast and mold and coliform count. The different species of Aspergilli, Penicillium, Rhizopus, Fusarium and Mucor were identified. A total number of colonies of each category of the samples were enumerated and the collected data's were subjected to statistical analysis as per Snedecor and Cochran (1980). The rate of isolates of each mould in the khoa samples were calculated as a percentage of the total number of the isolates. The present investigation shows that all the samples collected from various sources found more numbers microbiological count.