Evaluation of the Chemical Composition and Sensory Properties of Soy-agidi Fortified with Alternanthera brasiliana Powder

Weaning foods are nutritionally balanced foods introduced to infants after six months. High cost of nutritious proprietary weaning foods such as SMA promilk, and Similac; that are beyond the reach of most less privileged families in developing countries like Nigeria. Therefore, this has necessitated the fortification of locally available weaning food such as agidi. In this study, chemical composition and sensory properties of soy-agidi fortified with Alternanthera brasiliana were investigated. Maize grains and soybean seeds used were purchased from Ubani Main market in Umuahia North Local Government Area, while fresh leaves of A. brasiliana was obtained from a farm in Umudike, all in Abia State. One (1) kg of maize was sorted and steeped in portable water for 5hrs intermittently. The steeped maize was wet milled in a milling machine, sieved using a clean muslin cloth, decanted and pressed with cheese cloth to obtain maize slurry. Exactly 1kg of soybean seeds were sorted, blanched and soaked into 5% NaHSO3 solution for 6hrs with change in water at intervals. The hulls were removed by water floatation and cotyledons obtained were milled into paste. The A. brasiliana leaves were sorted, washed, dried in oven at 50oC for 5hrs and ground to obtain A.brasiliana powder. Agidi samples were formulated with different blends of maize, soybean and Alternanthera brasiliana powder respectively (100:0:0, 80:10:10, 70:20:10, 60:30:10, and 50:40:10). The blends were mixed with 300ml of water each, cooked in 1000ml of boiling water for 10min. Agidi sample prepared from 100% maize served as control. The chemical composition and sensory properties of the Agidi samples were evaluated with standard methods. Results obtained showed that the chemical composition of the Agidi samples ranged from 16.36 to 19.84%, 10.64 to 29.05%, 0.81 to 3.46%, 3.98 to 9.83%, 0.87 to 2.42%, 38.88 to 63.86%, 3.64 to 4.77mg/100g, 33.55 to 45.08mg/100g, 3.02 to 6.64mg/100g, 163.34 to 302.02µg/100g, 0.72 to 13.37mg/100g for moisture content, crude protein, crude fibre, fat, ash, carbohydrate, iron, calcium, zinc, vitamin A and vitamin C respectively. Agidi sample from 100% maize was the most preferred, followed by sample from 80% maize, 10% soybean and 10% A. brasiliana in that order.