Extruded Baru flour addition (Dipteryx Alata Vog.) in cookie formulations: effect on consumer's acceptability

The pulp of baru (Dipteryx alata Vog.), a species of the Fabaceae family that occurs in the Brazilian savannah, can be exploited for its high fiber, minerals and proteins content, in addition to its unique flavor. In order to increase the demand for nutritional foods and to assess new sources of food, this study investigated the effect of baru pulp flour addition during formulation of cookies on consumers' acceptability. Mixture of baru pulp flour (BPF) and rice flour (RF) in a proportion of 30:70 (w/w, d.b.) was extruded in a single lab extruder resulting in baru-rice pre-gelatinized flour (BRF). Five cookies samples (0, 10, 20, 30 and 40% BRF) were evaluated on overall liking, texture and flavor acceptability by consumers. According to overall acceptability scores, consumers were classified into different clusters using the Euclidean distances and Ward's aggregation method. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) identified uniform or atypical groups of observations. The BPF sugar content and functional properties of raw and extruded mixtures of BPF and RF (30:70, 40:60, w/w) were also determined. BPF presented high sugar content (30.3% sucrose, 22.8% fructose and 6.7% glucose). In general, consumers preferred the cookie formulated with 10% of BF, mostly due to changes in its flavor. The maximum BRF percentage to be added in cookie formulation in order to avoid a loss in consumers' acceptability was estimated considering the first significant difference and corresponded to 12.82%. Nevertheless, different clusters of consumers could be identified with different overall liking scores and characteristics of gender, income and age. The PCA analysis confirmed the preference of cookies with 10% BRF, but the cookies with 20, 30 and 40% BRF had a good acceptance by a large group of consumers. These findings indicate the potential use of the extruded mixture with BPF to improve the nutritional quality of foods.