Effect of Malting on Nutritional Profile of Alfalfa Seeds and Development of Value Added Fermented Products

The nutritive quality of legumes is poor due to deficiency of certain amino acids, low protein and starch digestibility and presence of certain anti-nutritional factor. As a result, processing techniques are adopted to overcome these problems and increases the palatability of legumes. Malting is one of the simple and inexpensive traditional processing techniques that are widely accepted for achieving desirable changes in the composition of legumes. In view of the above aspects the aim of present work was to investigate the effect of malting on nutritional profile of alfalfa seeds and development of value added fermented products. The nutritional profile (moisture, ash, protein, fat, fibre, carbohydrate, calcium and iron content) of unmalted and malted alfalfa flours were analysed with standard protocols. Fermented products viz; Dhokla and Appe were developed by incorporating malted alfalfa flour (MAF) at 10%, 15% and 20% level and organoleptic evaluated by 5-point composite Score and 9-point hedonic scale. The study data revealed that malted alfalfa flour contain significantly increased content of protein (19.6%), fibre (29.1%), iron (39.9%) and calcium (93.9%) when compared to unmalted alfalfa flour at P≥0.05 level. Sensory evaluation showed that fermented products developed at 10% level of incorporation of malted alfalfa flour were highly acceptable and registered insignificant difference at P≤ 0.05 level when compared with their respective standard products. Thus, it can be concluded that the malted alfalfa seeds contain appreciable amount of nutrients that may be used in the formulation of fermented food products and advantageous in human health.