Developing Functional Foods Using Red Palm Olein: Objective Color and Instrumental Texture

Abstract

Edible red palm olein (RPOL) has been newly developed by the Malaysian Palm Oil Board for use in food products to enhance their nutritional value. The results of the effect of RPOL and red palm shortening (RPS) on the objective color and instrumental texture of these functional foods are presented. The results indicate that using up to 100% RPS in the test bread samples did not have any adverse effect on the textural quality of the samples, with the results being comparable with the respective control breads. However, increasing the level of RPOL caused a simultaneous increase in compression force with the values being highest at the 100% replacement level. Replacement with RPOL in bread formulations at the 100% level increased the compression force to 15.2 N for whole-wheat bread, 7.5 N for white bread, and 11.7 N for 20% bran (0.2 kg bran/kg flour) bread over that of control whole-wheat bread (8.3 N), control white bread (3.3 N), and control 20% bran bread (4.2 N). This indicates that RPOL does not perform as well in pan bread as compared with RPS. Using 0.5% diacetyl tartaric acid esters of monoglycerides (DATEM) in bread formulations produced a decrease in compression force values at all combination levels of RPS and RPOL, thus producing a softer product. As RPOL and RPL are extremely rich in carotene pigments (727 ppm), the major changes in crumb color were observed in the yellowness values (b*). The results indicate that increasing the level of RPS or RPOL in test bread samples caused a similar increase in crumb color yellowness values (b*), with a higher increase observed due to increased levels of RPOL.

Keywords:

• Red palm olein
• Objective color
• Instrumental texture
• Bread
• Cookies
• Functional foods

Acknowledgments

The authors express their gratitude to the managements of the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) and the Malaysian Palm Oil Board for their financial support and encouragement to execute this research. We also thank the Carotino Company, Malaysia, for supplying the RPOL and RPS samples, and the Kuwait Flour Mills and Bakeries Co. for providing flour and wheat bran samples, free of charge.