Development and Optimization of Flakes from Some Selected Locally Available Food Materials

Abstract

Flakes are one of the most popular ready-to-eat breakfast cereals meals. Most traditional instant breakfast meals are from mono-cereals. This work aims to develop, characterize and optimize value-added instant cereal breakfast flakes using flours of rice, sorghum, and soybean. A three-component constrained optimal (custom) mixture experimental design was employed for the formulation. The formulation design constraints were: rice flour (30%–35%), sorghum flour (20%–25%), and soybean flour (5%–10%). Other ingredients were water (19%), sugar (8%), malt (2%), egg (3%), sweet potato (3%), ginger (2%) and moringa seed powder (3%). The formulated samples were analysed and evaluated based on standard procedures for quality characteristics. Numerical optimization gave the optimal product\'s overall desirability index of 0.519 obtained from 31.9 % rice flour, 22% sorghum flour, and 6.05% soybean flour; with quality properties as follows: 3.67% moisture content, 3.18% fat content, 3.08% ash content, 1.44% crude fibre, 30.0% crude protein, 58.6% nitrogen-free extract, 384 kcal energy value, and 7.28 overall acceptability. The result of the study showed that the nutritional qualities of cereal flakes can be improved through food-to-food composite formulations, employing numerical optimization technique.