Process and product optimization to improve the quality of an instant noodle manufactured by a company in Ghana

Abstract

Noodles consumption is gradually becoming a part of the Ghanaian food system and is attractive to people of diverse income classes. The quality of cooked noodle is therefore a major criterion in determining the brand of cooked noodle to buy. One company’s cooked noodle has been rated poorly by customers, because of strands of the noodle sticking together, high salt content after cooking and not glossy as other brands. The cooked noodle is not as glossy as other brands. Two types of flour, Baker’s and Australian Soft (AS), were evaluated for their nutritional, functional, pasting properties and physicochemical properties. Noodles were produced using the current processing method by the company and quality attributes of size, rehydration characteristics and texture of the noodle were assessed. A preference test, involving a 7-point hedonic scale, was used to evaluate the glossiness, texture, taste and acceptability of the noodles. The attributes of noodle made from Baker’s flour had a higher overall acceptability of 5.3, compared to 3.9 for noodles made from AS flour. The Baker’s flour thus used in the optimization studies, using an extreme vertices mixture design, with Mianjia salt and gluten as the main components, with a single total of 1. Nutritional, and cooking properties were positively affected by varying proportions of the two components in the mixture formulations, whereas instrumental texture attributes were affected negatively. Moisture content of all the noodles samples were less than 9%, while protein and ash ranged from 11 to 14% and 0.5 to 0.7% respectively. Models from the optimization revealed that the optimum combination of 0.57 Mianjia salts and 0.43 gluten was predicted to have sensory scores ranging between 5.2 and 6.2. The validated sensory scores were 5.3, 6.3, 5.1 and 6.2 respectively for glossiness, texture, taste and overall acceptability. Deviation of the validated scores from the predicted scores was less than 0.04. The study has demonstrated marked improvement in the formulation of noodles using Mianjia salts and added gluten, since noodles produced with the optimized formula had better sensory attributes compared to the control sample