Abstract
The passion fruit powder blended rice flour based extrudate was developed and investigated in terms of physicochemical and phytochemical properties. The extrusion process was performed using a twin screw extruder and optimized using rotatable central composite design followed by response surface methodology. The effect of process parameters such as temperature (80-150 °C), screw speed (200-400 rpm), moisture content (20-30%) and passion fruit powder (0-15%) on product quality was investigated. The optimum extrusion conditions of temperature, screw speed, feed moisture content, and passion fruit powder were 97.50 °C, 250 rpm, 25.20% and 11.25%, respectively. At optimum condition, the predicted values of responses were expansion ratio 8.05, water absorption index 2.77, total phenolic content 129.492 mg GAE/100 g and DPPH scavenging activity 65.79%. A comparison between optimized and control extrudates revealed that thermal, crystallinity and morphological properties of extrudates differed significantly. The comparison was also conducted in terms of FT-IR, SEM-EDS and HPLC analysis. The phytochemical properties showed that β-carotene, cyanidin-3-glucoside, peonidin-3-D-glucoside chloride were higher in control whereas the optimized sample evinced more (±)-α-tocopherol and D-α-tocopherol.