Farinha de sementes de melão neve (cucumis melo sp.) produzida por secagem intermitente e contínua e aplicada a biscoitos tipo cookies.

Abstract

Creating food products aimed at stimulating human consumption and at the same time reducing food waste and energy consumption is an activity of social, economic, scientific and technological interest. Flour is one of the products that can be produced from byproducts such as husks, leaves, seeds and stalks, it can increase nutritional properties, in addition to presenting exclusive characteristics when added in the preparation of breads, cookies and cakes changes in physical characteristics - chemical and sensory changes. Therefore, this research aimed to obtain snow melon (Cucumis melo sp.) seed flour from intermittent and continuous drying carried out in a fixed bed dryer at temperatures of 50 and 70 ºC under the influence of air velocity at 0.8 ms-1. The drying kinetics and mass diffusion were studied; Once the flours were obtained, they were submitted to evaluations regarding physical-chemical and physical parameters. The flour considered to be the best produced was added to the formulation of cookies, partially replacing wheat flour for further sensory evaluation. The cookies formulation that obtained the highest approval was analyzed for hygroscopic behavior through adsorption isotherm and isosteric heat, microbiological analysis, and storage at room temperature for 90 days. Of the models used to predict the drying kinetics, Page was the one that obtained the best results, both for the effective working time and for the prediction of the intermittent kinetics using the LS Optimizer. Intermittent drying showed an energy efficiency of 34.07, 28.82, 28.57 and 27.43% for experiments 1, 2, 4 and 5 respectively. Only experiment 1 showed water activity above 0.5; The solubility of flours produced at 70 °C was higher than those produced at 50 °C; The cookies were made with the flour from experiment 2; The cookies were within the standards required by current legislation in relation to microbiology; Formulation F3 (45% snow melon flour) was the one with the highest acceptability scores; The Peleg model was the one that showed the best fit in the prediction of adsorption isotherms.