Making biscuits from orange juice processing waste

When fruit is processed, parts such as the core, peel, pips and kernel are discarded. The by-products of the orange juice industry are rich in active compounds and have high nutritional content. Researchers in Brazil have identified a way to make better use of these by-products, producing a flour from orange juice by-product called Orange by-product flour (OBPF).

First, the researchers obtained the fibrous inner layer of fresh oranges after juice extraction. This by-product was manually triturated and washed in water for 30 min, and then the material was oven-dried and ground in a mill and sieved.

The study characterised the resulting OBPF in terms of its chemical composition, dietary fibre, phenolic compounds, antioxidant potential and hygroscopic properties. It then applied this flour to produce biscuits, and evaluated the effect of substituting wheat flour by OBPF.

In general, the properties of the biscuits were not significantly influenced by using OBPF as a substitution for wheat flour.

The study reported that the OBPF presented a very high content of dietary fibre (73.61% dry matter (DM)), minerals (ash = 2.72% DM), and total phenolic compounds (534 ± 30 mg gallic acid equivalent (GAE)/100 g of DM).

Sensorial analyses showed that biscuits produced with 10% OBPF presented the higher scores. Therefore, the report concluded that the OBPF showed interesting characteristics, suggesting its possible use in the development of fibre-enriched foods such as biscuits.

The study was designed to provide the orange juice processing industries with another strategy towards the application of a circular economy in the food system.

Source:

Castro, L.A.; Lizi, J.M.; Chagas, E.G.L.; Carvalho, R.A.; Vanin, F.M. From Orange Juice By-Product in the Food Industry to a Functional Ingredient: Application in the Circular Economy. Foods 2020, 9, 593.

For the full article, visit https://doi.org/10.3390/foods9050593.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Дмитрий Потапов