Development of Ready to Eat (Rte) Breakfast Cereal From Sorghum-pigeon Peas Blends

Abstract

Sorghum is under-utilized crop and one of the most important cereal crops in semi-arid tropics. In Kenya, sorghum is grown in the often drought prone marginal agricultural areas and has great potential to be an important commodity in the fight against food insecurity. Although sorghum production is well below its potential, there are well established traditional food products made from sorghum which can be easily commercialized with new technological improvement on quality. It was against this background that the project was conceptualized to fill in the gaps in value addition efforts of sorghum. The main objective was to develop sorghum-pigeon peas flour blends towards addressing food and nutrition security in Kenya. To accomplish this, the study first assessed the utilization and processing of sorghum by small holder farmers and farmer groups/SMEs in Makueni County. A cross sectional study design was used to collect data using key informant interviews (20), household survey questionnaires (300), and focus group discussions (12) with the small holder farmers. The farmers’ average sorghum farming experience was found to be 8.2 years. The age of the farmer was positively correlated with their experience in sorghum production. Level of education also had direct impact in sorghum production with those who had lower levels of education having significantly (P˂0.05) higher number of years of involvement in sorghum farming. The main uses of sorghum include: Thin porridge (uji) (42.6%), stiff porridge (ugali) (35.2%), githeri (sorghum mixed with legumes) (11.5%), fried dough (mandazi) (3.1%), flat bread (chapatti) (2.6%), beverage (sorghum tea) (1.2%) and other uses such as preparation of sorghum cake (3.8%). Female farmers reported significantly (P˂0.05) higher utilization level (59%) with more diversified products compared to their male counterparts. The greatest challenges that hinders utilization and limits processing of sorghum were found to be limited market access (12.3%), low volumes of production due to low productivity (3.5%), lack of capital (4.6%), pest and diseases (38.2%), lack of equipment (24.6%) and lack of processing knowledge (16.8%.). The study also sought to establish the effect of fermentation, dehulling and malting techniques on nutritional, ant-nutritional, sensory quality, microbial quality, and shelf life of formulated sorghum-pigeon peas flakes. Malting and fermentation had significantly (P<0.05) increased the protein content (11.3% and 13.6% respectively). The protein content increased significantly (P<0.05) with increase in the ratio of the pigeon peas. Dehulling accompanied by fermentation was the most effective ...........................