DEVELOPING AND APPLYING FUNCTIONALLY BIOACTIVE PULSE PREBIOTICS AS NOVEL FOOD INGREDIENTS

Overall long-term goal of our proposed study is to develop sustainable, affordable, safe and user friendly new food ingredients from pulses for improving the applications of pulses, including pulse prebiotics. As a first step towards achieving our long term goals, our objective in this research is to develop raffinose prebiotics from variety of pulses and test their applications on yogurt. Our central hypothesis is that prebiotics from pulses will increase overall quality of yogurt. We have based our hypothesis on our preliminary studies, in which we demonstrated that addition of chickpea flour increased the overall quality of yogurt. The rationale underlying the investigation is to optimize the method of extraction of prebiotics from a variety of pulses and analyze how prebiotics affects the physio-chemical and microbiological characteristics of yogurt.Objective 1: Extract, characterize, and quantify prebiotics from selected pulses using different solventsObjective 2: Analysis of physio-chemical properties, and microbiological properties of pulse prebiotic fortified yogurt.Objective 3: Determination and sensory quality of yogurt supplemented with prebiotics.