Elaboração e caracterização de cookie produzido com farinha de semente de melão (Cucumis melo L.)

Abstract

Adequate nutrition is everyone's right, but there are populations with high levels of food insecurity. Meanwhile, 1.3 billion tons of aliment is wasted in the world, reducing availability and access to foo and generating economic and environmental impacts. As a way to try to mitigate this waste and promote food safety, stalks, leaves, peels and seeds of fruits and vegetables, which are generally discarded, could be used in food because of its nutritional value. Considering this, melon (Cucumis melo L.), widely produced in the Northeast of Brazil, especially in Ceará and Rio Grande do Norte, has seeds that are commonly discarded, but which could be used in the manufacture of foods, such as flours, which in turn could be used in bakery products. The objective of this study was to elaborate and characterize whole and refined melon seed flours and to produce cookies with these flours, performing their physical and physicochemical characterization in order to find out if the use of these flours would improve the nutritional quality of Cookies. For that, after the manufacture of refined and whole melon seed flour, four cookies formulations were produced, being a control, without the addition of melon seed flour; a cookie with 10% refined flour; one with 10% whole flour and a fourth formulation with the flour mixture, being 5% refined and 5% integral. After elaboration, the cookies were submitted to the physical and nutritional characterization analyzes. The flours in question presented good yield, were shown as sources of calcium, and their use was able to decrease the sodium content in cookies. In particular, the refined melon seed flour had good concentrations of proteins and lipids, and was able to increase the contents of these nutrients in the cookies; while the whole meal presented high amounts of total carbohydrates, possibly being rich in fiber. Thus, the present research shows that the use of melon seeds in the manufacture of flours, and in turn, in the processing of cookies, may be viable from a nutritional and processing point of view, reducing food waste and taking advantage of their nutritional qualities.