Improving the Quality of Bread Made from Corn and Wheat Flour Acceptable by Congolese Consumers

Abstract

The study aims to improve the quality of bread made from corn and wheat flours acceptable to Congolese consumers. Wheat is the most consumed food at breakfast, but it is not within the reach of all budgets. To address this shortage, several alternatives exist to replace wheat flour with other cereals or starches. A bread formulation composed of wheat and corn flours acceptable to Congolese consumers was explored. The study involved three experiments to optimize the sensory characteristics of bread made from wheat and corn flours. The first experiment focused on improving the sensory quality of bread made from a mixture of malted and unmalted corn flours. The experiment involved a two-component simplex centroid mixture design, with unmalted corn flour (A) and malted corn flour (B) mixed for a total of 18 g. The second experiment examined the effects of salt and sugar mixture on the quality of corn and wheat flour bread. The third experiment evaluated the effects of humidity and baking time on the color, smell, and taste of bread. The bread samples were made according to a formulation resulting from previous optimization experiments, with the same proportions of ingredients. The bread preparation process involved weighing and mixing the ingredients, kneading manually for a specific time. The optimization resulted in a flour mixture of 11% malted corn and 48% wheat with other ingredients. The sensory evaluation of this bread gave an average score of 7 on a 1 to 9 scale, confirming the predictions of the optimization. The physicochemical characterization gave the following values: 22.76% water content, 10.18% protein, 3% ash, 1.43% lipids and 0.01 to 0.04% calcium, magnesium, iron, and phosphorus.