Abstract
Highland barley is increasingly recognized as its nutritional benefits but its structure restricts the development and utilization in the food industry. The quality of highland barley products may be impacted by pearling, an essential step before the hull bran is consumed or further processed. The nutrition, function and edible qualities of three highland barley flour (HBF) with different pearling rates were assessed in this study. The content of resistant starch was the highest when the pearling rate of QB27 and BHB was 4%, while 8% of QB13. Un-pearled HBF showed higher DPPH, ABTS and superoxide radicals inhibition rates. The break rates of QB13, QB27 and BHB obviously decreased from 51.7%, 53.3% and 38.3% to 35.0%, 15.0% and 6.7% respectively at 12% pearling rate. PLS-DA model further attributed the improvement of pearling on noodles quality to the alteration of resilience, hardness, tension distance, breaking rate and water absorption of noodles.