NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
April 6, 2000
Applause. That was the audience's answer to the question, "Did everybody like it?" Even so, many more questions need to be answered before consumers will be able to sample a new kind of pasta that cereal scientists at North Dakota State University are cooking up.
The pasta was in the form of spaghetti, and it was served at a noon luncheon during the 58th Flax Institute of the United States, an international conference held biennially in Fargo. The taste panel for this less-than-scientific evaluation was comprised of scientists and other researchers who attended the three-day research reporting session, some from countries as far away as Poland.
Twirling Some Possibilities
"The spaghetti those folks ate was made with 10-percent finely ground flaxseed. The variety we used was Omega, NDSU's golden-seeded variety," says Frank Manthey, an assistant professor in NDSU's cereal science department. "Pasta is such a simple product. Basically, it's semolina (milled durum) that's been hydrated to about 32 percent, extruded through a die, placed in a drier and dried. It's this simplicity that makes pasta such a nice carrier for a number of other ingredients--in this case, flaxseed."
The goal of Manthey's preliminary research was to determine the quality of spaghetti containing ground flaxseed. He and other NDSU researchers ground and then sieved the flax to create a coarse blend and a fine blend, each of which they combined at rates of 5, 10 and 15 percent with commercial semolina coming from the North Dakota State Mill. The researchers used 100-percent semolina as the comparison check.
Manthey and his colleagues found that the 15-percent flaxseed-semolina mixture could not be developed adequately into a dough. Also, it took longer for the pasta dough to develop in both the 5- and 10-percent mixtures, and it took longer for the dough containing the finely ground flaxseed to develop than it did for the coarser mixture. Another factor for determining the quality of pasta is dough strength, which cereal scientists judge based on a dough's peak height. The addition of the ground flaxseed reduced dough strength, particularly the dough containing the finely ground flaxseed.
"One of the characteristics with the semolina-flaxseed mixture is that we did pick up a lot of the flaxseed particles on the extruder's machinery," Manthey says. "This could be a source of some concern on a commercial basis because the build-up could restrict the flow of the semolina to the auger during the extrusion."
Both the coarse and fine-textured flaxseed-semolina doughs required less energy during the extrusion process than did the 100-percent semolina dough. Manthey says this is because the flaxseed contributes to a weaker dough. Likewise, the flaxseed doughs went through the extruder at cooler temperatures than the 100-percent semolina dough, but the temperatures of the flaxseed doughs remained within an acceptable range for processing.
In terms of appearance, the dried spaghetti containing 10-percent flaxseed, both coarse and finely ground blends, was noticeably darker than the spaghetti made from 100-percent semolina. But in terms of smoothness, the spaghetti containing the 10-percent finely ground blend appeared similar to the check.
"When we cooked the spaghetti, we found that the darker color resulting from the flaxseed does bleach out somewhat," Manthey adds.
The strength of dried spaghetti is a concern for processors because of the handling involved from factory to dinner table. The NDSU researchers found that the flaxseed-based spaghetti, regardless of the percentage, was significantly weaker--that is, more brittle--than the spaghetti made from 100-percent semolina.
When it came to evaluating cooking quality, the NDSU researchers found no significant differences in cooking loss of the spaghetti containing the finely ground flaxseed, regardless of the percentage, as compared to spaghetti made from 100-percent semolina. But the presence of flaxseed did reduce the cooked firmness of the spaghetti, compared to that of the check.
"Our conclusion, or perhaps it's an optimistic outlook, is that we believe an acceptable product can be made using very finely ground flaxseed and using semolina from a durum variety that has very strong gluten strength." Manthey says.
Future research efforts at NDSU involving flaxseed-blended pasta will address the following issues:
Why Flax?
What's so special about flaxseed? More than half the fat it contains is alpha-linolenic acid, an omega-3 fatty acid. By comparison, conventional sunflower hybrids contain significant percentages of linoleic (omega 6) fatty acid. Nutritionists consider both the omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids to be essential because the human body cannot manufacture these compounds. In other words, humans need to eat foods containing omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids to maintain their health, says Patricia Berglund, director of the Northern Crops Institute on the NDSU campus. Before assuming her current position, Berglund was involved in food and nutrition research at NDSU.
Many researchers believe the human diet has gotten out of balance with respect to omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids. For example, researchers studying the diets of early human populations, those dating back to before the era of industrialized agriculture, have found that the ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acids was 1-to-1, says Lloyd Horrocks, professor emeritus with The Ohio State University College of Medicine and Public Health.
Since the development of what Horrocks calls "corn-based" agriculture, humans have been consuming more omega 6 fatty acid than omega 3. He says that ratio is now 10-to-1 or perhaps even 20-to-1. The World Health Organization currently recommends an omega 6-to-omega 3 ratio of 3-to-1 or 4-to-1, but the United States has no recommendation in place.
Horrocks has been studying the relationship between a particular type of omega 3 fatty acid found in the human brain--docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA--and the health effects resulting from low levels of DHA. He says low levels of DHA have been associated with dyslexia, depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
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Source: Frank Manthey (701) 231-6356
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136