Evaluation of physical and functional properties of weaning food blended with banana, sweet potato and drumstick leaves powder

Abstract

The weaning period is a crucial period in an infant's life. At the age of 5–6 months, most infants begin to eat supplementary semisolid foods. At this stage homogenized infant foods play a major role in their nutrition. In developing country like India hidden hunger is one of the main problem due to deficiency of micronutrients like vitamins and minerals especially vitamin A, iron and zinc. Cereal gruel is the common complementary foods in developing countries, and it is usually low in energy and protein, thus increase in protein-energy malnutrition among underprivileged weaning aged children. In this context present experiment was conducted to formulate weaning food (7 treatments) for infants from malted wheat flour, malted ragi flour, malted green gram flour, roasted flax seed powder blended with banana, sweet potato and drumstick leaves powder. Functional and physical properties of the formulated samples were analyzed. The maximum L*(80.69) a* (1.70) and b* (12.63) values were recorded in T7. Treatment T1 [MWF (10%) +MRF (10%) +MGF (10%) + BP (50%) + SPP (10%) + DLP (5%) +RFP (5%)had low bulk density(0.52 g/cc), water absorption capacity (43.88%) and cooking time(2.54 min). This implies that it forms low viscous and high caloric density food per unit volume rather than a high viscosity or high volume density.