There is an urgent need is felt to shift towards healthier options like supplementing the popular fast-food with crops like barley being rich in proteins, fiber, ?-glucan and tocols, including tocopherols and tocotrienols. This paper throws light on one of such attempt where value added pasta-based on barley was made and barley based pasta using barley genotype namely BH-942 (with variations in combinations of 40:50:10, 50:40:10 and 60:30:10 for barley flour, chickpea flour and refined flour); were investigated for nutritional evaluation. The objective of this study was to assess the quality of pasta made by partially substituting refined wheat flour with barley flour in combination with chickpea flour.
Extruded pasta was developed from processed barley flour subjected to three types of processing viz., soaking, popping and malting. Their physical and sensory characteristics were recorded in the present investigation. It was found that the highest mean score of overall acceptability was recorded from type II pasta and composite flour-based pasta was found to be acceptable by the judges. It was also observed that malted flour pasta had the highest content of insoluble fiber (4.99 g/100g) followed by soaked, popped and control flour pasta, respectively. The highest crude protein, crude fiber, crude fat and ash contents were found in malted pasta and non-significant (p<0.05) difference was observed in the control, popped and soaked pasta for dietary fiber content. The study thus suggests that malting of barley may be done for improving its nutritional value. It also proposes the replacement of traditional food ingredients like wheat flour and refined flour with barley for preparing various food products may be nutritious and beneficial, too.