Production of nutritional bars with different proportion of oat flour and brown rice flour

Abstract

In this era, consumers eat not only to satisfy hunger, but also in response to having better health status by searching for foods of high nutritional values. Therefore, the demand for nutritional and functional food products have been rapidly increasing. Among many other available functional foods in the markets worldwide, nutritional bars are of attractively paid as they are containing both basic and essential nutrients as well as quick energy release. However, the major ingredients in the commercialized nutritional bars are come mainly from oat flour which is rather expensive in comparison to other crops such as brown rice, wheat, maize. The objective of this study was to investigate the replacement possibility of oat flour by using brown rice flour in nutritional bars to minimize the production cost with different ratio of brown rice flour: 30%, 50%, 70%, and 100%. The nutritional bars were assessed for physico-chemical analysis and sensory evaluation to know whether differences exist or not. In term of nutritional values, nutritional bars containing up to 70% brown rice flour showed no significant differences among moisture, ash, fiber, fat content, total phenolic content in comparison to the control sample (p>0.05). The samples with 100% of brown rice substitution had the lowest proximate values. By taking statistical analysis, hedonic sensory test revealed that the bars prepared with brown rice flour had similar (P>0.05) taste, aroma, overall acceptability scores to that of the control sample. Based on the obtained results, the substitution of oat flour by brown rice flour was highly feasible which maintained almost characteristics of nutritional bars while reducing the production cost. Key words: Oats flour, Brown rice flour, nutritional bars, physicochemical analysis, sensory evaluation, nutritional values, total phenolic compounds, production cost