Beans IN toast: UK project to enhance bread with faba beans

As part of the £2 million, three-year, publicly-funded ‘Raising the Pulse’ project, which was announced in the Nutrition Bulletin journal on 18 January, researchers at the University of Reading are aiming to encourage British consumers and food producers to switch to bread containing faba beans (commonly known as broad beans).

The project is designed to increase pulses in the UK diet, particularly faba beans, due to their favourable growing conditions in the UK and the nutritional enhancement they can provide to products such as bread.

Despite being an excellent alternative to the ubiquitous imported soya bean, used currently in bread as an improver, the great majority of faba beans grown in the UK currently go to animal feed.

Researchers are optimising the sustainability and nutritional quality of beans grown in the UK, with a view to encouraging farmers to switch some wheat-producing land to faba beans for human consumption.

Faba beans are particularly high in easily digested protein, fibre and iron, nutrients that can be low in some UK diets. But the majority of people are not used to cooking and eating faba beans, which poses a challenge.

Professor Julie Lovegrove from the University of Reading is leading the ‘Raising the Pulse’ research program. She said: “We had to think laterally: What do most people eat and how can we improve their nutrition without them having to change their diets? The obvious answer is bread!

“96% of people in the UK eat bread, and 90% of that is white bread, which in most cases contains soya. We’ve already performed some experiments and found that faba bean flour can directly replace imported soya flour and some of the wheat flour, which is low in nutrients. We can not only grow the faba beans here, but also produce and test the faba bean-rich bread, with improved nutritional quality.”

Before there are products to be tested, the beans must be grown, harvested and milled. ‘Raising the Pulse’ seeks to improve these stages as well. Researchers will be choosing or breeding varieties that are healthful as well as high-yielding, working with the soil to improve yield via nitrogen-fixing bacteria, mitigating environmental impacts of farming faba beans, planning for the changing climate, and more.

‘Raising the Pulse’ is a multidisciplinary program of research, funded by the UKRI Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, as part of their ‘Transforming UK Food Systems’ initiative.

Image credit: iStock.com/takemax