OPTIMIZATION OF MILLET-LEGUME BASED COMPOSITE FLOUR, ITS RHEOLOGY AND USE AS PRO-HEALTH INGREDIENT IN BAKERY INDUSTRY

Modern day lifestyle and eating habits have significantly contributed to several health disorders and calls for inclusion of healthy ingredients in bakery industry. Dietary modification is suggestive of protecting against diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. Amongst them Diabetes Mellitus is one of five leading causes of deaths and debilitating disease in the world. With these serious health repercussions in mind, the present research intends to develop a functional composite flour comprising millets and legumes as a healthy bakery ingredient and also exploit its nutritional benefits in diabetes diet management. With extensive literature review, foxtail millet, pearl millet, finger millet and Bengal gram were chosen to understand the health benefits on diabetes patients over refined flour. Mixture Optimal (Custom) Design of Design Expert, v.11 was used for the statistical analysis. For the experimental design, the composite flour components (Foxtail millet, Pearl millet, Finger millet and Bengal gram) were the variables while the functional properties i.e., Water absorption capacity (WAC), oil absorption capacity (OAC), swelling power (SP), foaming capacity (FC), foaming stability (FS) and bulk density (BD) were the responses. The optimised flour with 20 % wheat flour was tested for dough characteristics using Brabender. Optimization with mixture optimal custom design resulted in six different solutions. Amongst them the best solution with highest desirability was selected which was foxtail millet (49.65%,), finger millet (10%), pearl millet (10%) and Bengal gram (10.35%) with desirability of 0.864. The ANOVA, R2 and R2 adjusted values for WAC, OAC, SP, FC and BD showed that the composite flours were statistically significant whereas FS model was not fit implying no significant effect of any composite flour ingredient on FS. Farinograph confirms that the optimised composite flour is high-quality strong flour. Composite flour with accepted functiona