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Description
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There is a high demand for milk substitutes other than soy beverages. Different reasons are driving consumer choices, from health to ethic grounds, centred on the GMO and CO2 footprint issues. The resulting response from the Industry, so far, is the offer of cereal based drinks like rice and oats and made from nuts like almond drinks which are essentially poor in protein content (around 1.5% max against 3.5% protein in milk) and are not true milk replacers in that sense. Pulses are known to be a low-fat source of protein, fibre, and many other vitamins and minerals, including vitamin B, which is important for vegetarians and vegans, they are also linked to increased bone strength, boosted cognitive abilities, sharpened memory, and reduced oxidative stress and inflammation. This turns pulses the food of choice for the elderly but also for the children. The major issue that is hampering the production of legume-based milk is the beany flavour, so negatively famous in soy milk. The beanyness of plant milks has been associated to the presence of endogenous lipoxygenases that oxidise unsaturated fatty acids in oil rich pulses like soy and peanuts (over 20% fat) but should be less pronounced in pulses like peas, lupins or chickpeas, very poor in fat (1,5 to 5%). Sprouting is becoming popular as a superfood, since germination mobilizes all sorts of dormant enzymes and hydrolyses the storage proteins and starch increasing digestibility and producing peptides that can have a very important impact on health as cancer prevention, immunoregulators and anti-inflammatory. Germination of pulse grains, and using the sprouts to produce the milk, will be tested as this is known to reduce the bitterness and beany flavour of the grains, increasing the bioactivity of the plant drink. The huge increment on bioactivity of the peptides produced during digestion of the proteins in the gut, or hydrolysed by proteinases coming from germination activity has been studied recently by our team and this will be investigated thoroughly to be used as argument for the marketing of these pulse milks. The recent pilot plant installation of the associated industry will be used to scale up the technology and product development will be worked out in collaboration with the respective R&D and marketing teams, fine tuning viscosity, aroma and flavour of the pulse milks as well as confirming digestibility and bioactivity of the solutions. The academic teams running the project are well experienced on these particular subjects, as shown in this application, and the Institution has all the necessary methods already installed and working well for the success of the project.
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