Characterization of commercial cricket protein powder and impact of cricket protein powder replacement on wheat dough protein composition

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Supplementation of foods with insect flours has been shown to be promising for improving the nutritional profile of food products. The objective of this study was to characterize two commercially available cricket protein powders and investigate their impact on molecular weight distribution when incorporated into wheat dough.Findings: Characterization of commercial cricket protein powders, GrioPro® (G) and Entomo Farms (E) was carried out by size exclusion high-performance liquid chromatography (SEC-HPLC), and sodium dodecyl sulfatepolyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE). The functionality of the cricket protein powders was examined by measuring water holding capacity (WHC) and protein solubility across a range of pH. To see the interactions between the cricket proteins in a food-based system wheat dough samples containing 10% or 20% replacement levels of the cricket powders were collected at peak torque development and analyzed to SEC-HPLC to quantify the change in soluble polymeric proteins (SPP) and insoluble polymeric proteins (IPP) and provide information on changes to protein molecular weight distribution. SDS-PAGE analysis showed bands ranging from 40 kDa to 160 kDa for sample E while sample G had no visible bands either due to poor solubility in SDS-PAGE sample buffer and/or the presence of very high molecular proteins that did not enter the gel. Sample E absorbed approximately 2.5 times its weight in water, which was significantly lower than G (~3.0 times its weight) while sample G was significantly lower in solubility than E across all pH levels. Conclusions: Both cricket protein powders increased in WHC and solubility as the pH increased. Wheat dough samples containing sample E had lower peak areas of IPP and no significant difference in SPP peak areas compared to the control. On the other hand, doughs containing sample G had a significant increase in IPP peak areas at the 20% replacement level.

Effect of cricket protein powders on dough functionality and bread quality

“…The addition of mustard seed flour to the wheat dough was also found to cause no difference in C1 torque (Mironeasa & Codină, 2017), which was similar to the results found here for addition of powder E and the lower levels of powder G addition to the wheat dough. The increase in C1 torque seen at the 20% replacement of G could be explained by there not being enough water available to fully hydrate the wheat proteins when mixed at constant water absorption, especially since powder G had a higher water holding capacity than E and therefore could be competing for water and further preventing the flour proteins from hydrating (Perez‐Fajardo et al, 2022). Such an effect was seen in rice flour + soy protein + transglutaminase mixture (gluten‐free application) where the high water holding capacity of the soy protein limited the water available for the other components and caused an increase in C1 torque (Rosell et al, 2011).…”

“…In addition, the shear and tensile forces applied during mixing also help develop the continuous network by stretching the high molecular weight glutenin subunits (HMW‐GS) into more extended conformations with potentially more time and energy required to unravel larger‐sized glutenin molecules (Southan & MacRitchie, 1999). Thus, the increased C1 torque in the 20% GrioPro cricket protein powder replacement level could also be due to the impact of the larger amount of high molecular weight proteins found in this dough (Perez‐Fajardo et al, 2022). This idea is supported by the significant correlation between the insoluble proteins (IPs) found in dough with C1 torque ( r = .94, p = .005).…”

“…Therefore, it could be possible that the pasteurization processing used to produce G allowed the cricket protein powder to remain hydrophilic and provide competition with starch for water as can be seen by the delay in gelatinization at the 20% G replacement level and therefore impacting the final crumb structure (onset of gelatinization correlated highly with hardness) (r = .89, p = .04). This was also supported by the increased water holding capacity seen in G compared to E (Perez-Fajardo et al, 2022) and by the lower amount of water needed to optimize the E containing doughs.…”

“…Another factor would be interference with the gluten network which impacts gas retention and leads to lower height and volume (Yuan et al, 2017). As discussed previously (Perez-Fajardo et al, 2022), powder G contained a higher amount of IPs which led to a decrease in dough extensibility. Furthermore, the drastic increase in Rmax/E ratio (Table 3) for G-containing breads (1.72 and 3.86) compared with the control (0.72) further portrays how the extensibility decreased with increasing addition of G (df 4, p < .0001).…”

“…Gupta et al (1995) stated that polymers above a specific size threshold may be detrimental to dough extensibility. Therefore, it could be possible that the extensibility was impacted more by powder G due to its larger quantity of high molecular weight proteins (Perez-Fajardo et al, 2022). Zhang et al (2008) showed that the soluble polymeric proteins from wheat were negatively correlated with the Rmax and that the insoluble polymeric proteins were positively correlated with maximum resistance.…”