Effect of Maturity and Drying Methods on Rheological and Physico-Chemical Properties of Reconstituted Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) Flour

Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) is a traditional staple crop grown for its starchy fruit throughout Oceania. This study therefore investigated the effect of maturity and different drying methods on some rheological and physicochemical properties of reconstituted breadfruit flour (Artocarpus altilis) (amala). Freshly harvested breadfruits (mature and immature) were washed in clean water to remove adhering latex and dirt, peeled, rewashed, drained and sliced. The sliced fruits were divided into three portions, each portion was dried in oven, sun, biomass fuelled dryer at 60 oC for some hours respectively until constant weights were observed. All the samples were milled with attrition mill, sieved with 0.35 mm aperture and each packaged in a 0.5mm thick plastic container, each sample was reconstituted, and the following analyses were carried out on the reconstituted breadfruit flour: proximate, compression, softness index, antinutritional, colour and sensory evaluation using standard methods. The result of proximate analysis showed (17.77, 14.50 and 13.82), (68.08, 75.45 and 78.03%) and (0.71, 0.45 and 0.46%) for protein, carbohydrate and crude fibre for matured sun, biomass fuelled and oven dried samples respectively and, (16.44, 12.38 and 7.54), (77.95, 78.26 and 84.30), (0.28, 0.50 and 0.47) for protein, carbohydrate and crude fibre for immatured sun, biomass fuelled and oven dried samples respectively. The Sun dried sample showed the highest protein content for both matured and immatured samples. Generally, it was observed that drying and reconstitution reduced the antinutritional content of breadfruit flour, while maturity and drying methods have little effect on the softness Index of the reconstituted breadfruit flour. The overall acceptability for sun and oven dried samples are the most acceptable. For production of high quality breadfruit flour, biomass drying of matured fruits is recommended because of its high protein content and low antinutritional factors though sun dried sample has higher protein content but past research works showed that sun drying method is susceptible to high microbial load. *