Development of a new low fat and nutraceutical falafel

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Falafel is popular among vegetarians, as an alternative to meat-based foods since it is mostly composed of chickpea. However, chickpea is a leguminous that is reported to have lower nutritive value than animal proteins due to the lack of essential amino acids, low protein digestibility and the presence of antinutritional compounds including protease inhibitors, phytic acid, lectins, that may impair the utilization of the nutrients by people. The goal of this project is to improve the falafel's nutritional quality by reducing chickpea content, incorporating seeds with higher protein quality, lower antinutritional compounds, containing more functional ingredients (ex: omega-3) and also by eliminating the frying process. ****The objectives of this project are i) Determine the best mix of three seeds (hemp, flax, and quinoa seed) in order to develop a falafel rich in functional ingredients ii) Optimize falafel formulation with food ingredients and baking conditions (time/temperature) in order to ensure highly-accepted physicochemical and organoleptic properties of the developed baked product iii) Determine the shelf life of the developed cooked product by microbiological and sensorial analysis. ****The research challenge is, to find the best in combination of ingredients with optimized concentration in order to provide a highly nutritive product with acceptable texture, taste and mouthfeel which could compete with the product presently exist in the market, and to optimize the baking process conditions for falafel to obtain the similar physicochemical and sensorial properties as fried falafel.**