The effect of chickpea flour and its addition levels on quality and <i>in vitro</i> starch digestibility of corn–rice-based gluten-free pasta

Abstract

Development of gluten-free (GF) pasta with improved nutritional attributes is one of the main trends in the gluten-free pasta industry. Considerable interest lays in introducing legume-based ingredients into traditional corn/rice GF formulations. This work aims to fortify multi-cereal (corn-rice) GF pasta with chickpea to investigate how different chickpea addition levels affect its quality and <i>in vitro</i> starch digestibility. Chickpea significantly increased pasta protein and dietary fibre contents to a level that supports the "source" or "high" fibre/protein content claims. Chickpea addition induced darkening, softening, adhesiveness decrease and solid loss reduction compared to the control. In addition, chickpea substitution significantly modified the <i>in vitro</i> starch digestion, which showed increasing resistant starch and decreasing slowly digestible starch contents suggesting potential mitigation of postprandial glucose response <i>in vivo</i>. Reformulating GF pasta with chickpea flour should, therefore, be considered as an effective tool to improve the corn-rice-based GF products' nutritional profile.