Abstract:
Pasta by itself is a healthy nutritional diet, and has great scope as an
ideal functional food if supplemented with additional health ingredients. Taking
this context into consideration there is a need to develop nutraceutical pasta
which explores different health ingredients that are compatible with the
physiological characteristics of pasta.
A study was conducted on development of nutraceutical pasta by cold
extrusion technique using lab scale DOLLY equipment. The samples were
made by mixing ingredients ragi, drumstick, atta, corn flour & yams. The
vegetables were further blanched, dried, powdered and mixed with pulverized
cereal. The extruded pasta was dried in cabinet dryer at a temperature of 65°C
for 30 min. The textural analysis using a texture analyzer showed that the force
required was higher for samples containing atta (for both cooked (0.7764 N) &
uncooked pasta (46.37 N)). This could be due to the high strength offered by
the gluten content in atta which makes stronger compared to millet based pasta
(for both cooked (0.466 N) & uncooked (23.9 N)). The colour values measured
by hunter lab colour flex meter showed a decrease in L* value (32.45) of ragi
based pasta compared to other combinations for both cooked and uncooked
samples. The percentage elongation checked with a digital vernier caliper after
cooking showed a higher elongation (16.8%) for pasta containing ragi and
higher thickness (96.55%) was observed for millet based pasta. The OCT and
solid loss for the optimized sample was less (5.5 min & 0.82% respectively).
The overall acceptability was found to be higher in the sample 5 followed by
the sample 4. It is observed that swelling power is less in treatment consists of
corn flour. The study concludes that developed nutraceutical pasta
incorporating ragi (25%), purple yam (55%), elephant yam (5%), drumstick
(5%) and atta (10%) is a good substitute for commercial pasta.
