Vol. 11, Issue 3 (2022)

Author(s):
Wasiya Farzana, Patel S and Palanimuthu V

Abstract:
Healthy puffed snack products are nowadays gaining huge importance due to its low cost of production, processing, and semi-skilled labour requirement. However, the quality of the puffed product significantly affects the consumer acceptability of product. The effectiveness of puffing methods (sand, hot-air, gun) under controlled conditions in enhancing the puffing quality was studied and the degradation in quality (moisture content, appearance, color, texture, aroma, taste, overall acceptability, crispiness) upon storage (PP, LDPE, HDPE, and MMPE; 3 months) was studied. The optimized conditions for sand puffing (Variety: Local tiptur, 2% (w/w) salt solution);hot-air puffing (2% (w/w) salt solution, puffing temperature – 300 ℃, grain moisture content - 12% w.b., hot-air velocity – 13ms^-1); gun-puffing, grain moisture content – (13% w.b. and steam pressure – 0.9 MPa) were employed to obtain the best quality and the observed values for gun puffing were, the volumetric expansion ratio (8.53) and the crispiness (8.52).