Enrichment of fresh egg pasta with antioxidant extracts obtained from wild Italian Plantago coronopus L. and Cichorium intybus L. and quality characterisation of the fresh end product
Conference Paper
Overview
Overview
abstract
Consumers are increasingly aware of the strong relationship between diet and health status and, for this
reason, they have changed food preferences and have increasingly oriented towards functional foods.
Indeed, functional foods represent new "enhanced" foods with healing-pharmaceutical characteristics.
These plants leaves are used salad ingredients in France and Italy and are well known for being rich in
phenolic compounds with antioxidant properties (Saybel, Rendyuk, Dargaeva, et al., 2020). The great
interest in phenolics as food ingredients is that they are used as anti-diabetic, antioxidant, antibacterial,
anti inflammatory, diuretic, digestive, and protector of other different diseases (Pereira, Custódio,
Rodrigues, et al., 2017). Therefore, this work aimed to apply a functional ingredient obtained from wild
edible plants in pasta food product. Bioactive compounds and nutraceutical qualities (radical scavenging
activity, inhibition of lipid peroxidation and antihaemolytic activity) were evaluated. A pasta-making
procedure was performed using different P. coronopus and C. intybus extract concentrations and different
drying times to research the pasta-making procedure’s optimisation. The phenolic compounds were
identified and quantified by LC DAD-ESI/MSn, with results expressed in mg/g extract. According to the
obtained results, twenty-six phenolic compounds were identified. Cichoric acid (36 ± 2 mg/g) was the
most abundant in C. intybus, followed by 5-O-caffeoylquinic acid (14.1 ± 0.1 mg/g), while in P.
coronopus, verbascoside (151 ± 6 mg/g) was the most abundant compound. Flavonoid rearranged with
different glycosidic molecules were found in the enriched pasta, i.e., apigenin-O-glucuronide,
kaempferol-O-malonyl-hexoside, and kaempferol-O glucuronide. A strong interaction between the plant
extract concentration and the drying time was demonstrated. These results indicated that plant extracts
could be used as a functional food ingrediente due to the significant antioxidant capacity and phenolic
profile preserved after the incorporation process in typical pasta. Relevant factors have already been
established, given that implementation of an experimental design provides more expansive knowledge.
The authors are grateful to the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT, Portugal) for financial support through national funds FCT/MCTES and FEDER under Programme PT2020 for financial support to CIMO
(UIDB/00690/2020). L. Barros and C. Pereira thanks the national funding by FCT through the institutional scientific employment program-contract for her contract, while B. Melgar and T. C. Finimundy contracts through the individual program (NORTE-06-3559-FSE-000188 and NORTE-01-0247- FEDER-113508).
