Rheological Behavior of Honey-Cereal Extrudates as a Function of Extrusion Processing Parameters

Extrusion cooking as an attractive process for continuous food production has been extensively developed in recent years. The high temperature–short time extrusion cooking is used in the food industry to produce direct expanded products such as snack foods, breakfast cereals and pet foods (Miller, 1990; Moore, 1994; Rokey, 1994). Extrusion of food material results in starch gelatinization, denaturation of protein, microbial reduction, enzyme activation or inactivation, color and other changes. The extents of these changes are dependent on the conditions of the extrusion. Those changes at the constituents’ level modify the rheological behavior of flour batters (Hagenimana et al., 2006). Refined cereal flours are chiefly utilized in preparation extruded snacks owing to high expansion capability of these cereal flours. However, such refined cereal flours being rich in mere carbohydrate and proteins lack nutritional quality. Hence, in order to provide consumers nutritionally superior extruded snacks, these days, whole grain cereal flours are being increasingly used. Contrary to the refined cereal flours, the whole grain cereal flours produces snacks with decreased expansion and unattractive physical appearance due to high fiber content.