The effect of chickpea flour and its addition levels on quality and in vitro starch digestibility of corn–rice-based gluten-free pasta

Abstract

Development of gluten-free (GF) pasta with improved nutritional attributes is one of the main trends in the gluten-free pasta industry. Considerable interest lays in introducing legume-based ingredients into traditional corn/rice GF formulations. This work aims to fortify multi-cereal (corn-rice) GF pasta with chickpea to investigate how different chickpea addition levels affect its quality and in vitro starch digestibility. Chickpea significantly increased pasta protein and dietary fibre contents to a level that supports the “source” or “high” fibre/protein content claims. Chickpea addition induced darkening, softening, adhesiveness decrease and solid loss reduction compared to the control. In addition, chickpea substitution significantly modified the in vitro starch digestion, which showed increasing resistant starch and decreasing slowly digestible starch contents suggesting potential mitigation of postprandial glucose response in vivo. Reformulating GF pasta with chickpea flour should, therefore, be considered as an effective tool to improve the corn–rice-based GF products' nutritional profile.

Keywords:

• Gluten-free pasta
• corn-rice-chickpea
• cooking quality
• in vitro starch digestion

Disclosure statement

We are reporting that author Michele Minucciani works in the Massimo Zero SRL, a gluten-free pasta manufacturer, a company that may be affected by the research reported in the enclosed paper. Other authors do not have conflict of interests to report.

Author contributions

Xinying Suo: conceptualisation, data curation-lead, formal analysis-lead, investigation-lead, visualisation, writing-original draft-lead. Margherita Dall’Asta: data curation, formal analysis, writing-review and editing. Gianluca Giuberti: formal analysis, writing-review & editing. michele minucciani: investigation, writing-review and editing. Zhangcun Wang: writing-review & editing. Elena Vittadini: conceptualisation, funding acquisition-lead, project administration-lead, supervision-lead, visualisation, writing-review and editing.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially funded by the Autonomous Province of Bolzano South Tyrol, Italy, (30/2020, n. 9913).