Technological and nutritional properties of instant noodles enriched with chickpea or lentil flour

Objective: To increase the nutritional value of instant noodles, enriched wheat flour with selected legume flours, chickpea or yellow lentil, at substitution ratios of 15%, 20%, and 25%. Methods: The technological and nutritional properties of the obtained instant noodles were studied in terms of proximate analysis, energy, cooking quality, amino acids content, rheological properties, and sensory evaluation. Results: Enrichment of durum wheat flour with lentil or chickpea flour improved the resulting instant noodles in terms of protein, crude fat, ash, and crude fiber contents, and contributed in reducing carbo-hydrates and energy obtained. Lysin, tryptophan, and threonine contents in durum wheat noodles were found to be 2.31, 1.09, and 3.15 g/100 g protein, respectively, which increased to 3.32, 1.34, and 3.45 g/100 g protein, respectively, with 25% replacement of chickpea flour. Greater increases were obtained with 25% replacement with lentil flour as the concentration of lysin, tryptophan, and threonine reached 3.34, 1.27, and 3.61 g/100 g protein, respectively. As the replacement ratio increased, the total essential amino acids increased from 36.96 % to 39.01% with 25% replacement of chickpea flour and 38.59 % with 25% replacement of lentil flour. Water absorption increased significantly from 59.71% to 69.01% with increasing proportion of chickpea or lentil flours in dough mixtures. The elevation in arrival time, dough development time, and stability time among the flour blends with 15% to 25% chickpea or lentil flours ranged from 1.7 to 2.1 min, 4.8 to 5.9 min, and 2.8 to 4.8 min, respectively. Sensory evaluation showed that the panelists significantly (p < 0.05) preferred replacing wheat flour with chickpea flour than lentil flour. Conclusion: Present study concluded that durum wheat flour can be replaced with 25% chickpea flour or 20% lentil flour to improve the nutritional value without negatively affecting rheological properties, cook-ing characteristics, or sensory qualities. (c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).