Examining the sensory and cooking qualities of noodles enriched with lentils and investigating the physical and functional attributes of composite flours

The current research aimed to develop extruded noodles with enriched nutritional content while maintaining acceptable physical and sensory properties of the noodles and composite flour.Five formulations; namely, C (100% wheat), T1 (90% wheat + 10% lentils), T2 (80% wheat + 20% lentils), T3 (70% wheat + 30% lentils), and T4 (60% wheat + 40% lentils), were assessed for cooked noodles using Hedonic scale.Among them, T3 (70% wheat + 30% lentils) and the control noodles (C-100% wheat) exhibited the highest acceptance in the study.The selected T3-Lentil-incorporated noodles composite flour (LINCF) had a lower bulk density (0.87 g/ml) compared to the control (0.89 g/ml).T3-LINCF also demonstrated superior water absorption capacity (121.33 ml/g) and swelling power (5.61%) in contrast to the C-control wheat noodles composite flour (CWNCF) (110.67 ml/g, 4.60%), while solubility was significantly higher for T3-LINCF (22.53) than the C-CWNCF (16.67).The cooking time for T3-Lentil-incorporated noodles (LIN) and Ccontrol wheat noodles (CWN) were 12.00 and 10.33 min, respectively.Additionally, T3-LIN showed higher cooked weight (76.86 g/25 g), cooking yield (307.46%), lower bulk density (0.52 g/ml), higher swelling index (2.22), and increased total solid loss in gruel (7.49%) compared to control noodles (71.06 g/25 g, 284.10%, 0.55 g/ml, 1.94%, 2.43% by mass, respectively).In conclusion, the study successfully developed lentil-incorporated extruded noodles with superior sensory attributes, functional properties and nutritional richness as evidenced by the higher acceptance of T3 formulation.These findings contribute valuable insights for producing healthier and well-accepted noodle products through extrusion processing.