| Resumo: | Over the last years, the rise of disease cases caused by different reasons have enforced people to live healthier and give attention to a diet with a significant effect on body health. Thus, there is a considerable interest in developing healthy food products. Bee pollen and bee bread (fermented bee pollen) are apicultural products composed mainly of flower pollen from plant species, and used in both traditional medicine and human nutrition for thousands of years due to its nutritional and physiological properties and recognized therapeutic and disease-preventing functions. Both bee pollen and bee bread are natural sources of carbohydrates, crude fibers, proteins and lipids as well as minor components such as phenolic compounds. In the last few years, research has focused on the study of novel raw materials and natural compounds that could be included in bread formulations in order to enhance health-promoting properties and the overall quality since bread is a common food all over the world in the daily diet. Thus, given the nutritional characteristics of bee pollen and bee bread, its application on breads has potential to enable the obtention of a healthier product as well as widen the possible applications of both bee pollen and bee bread. In this study, enriched bread samples with bee pollen and bee bread have been evaluated for nutritional properties such as protein, fat, sugars and, according to the results, enriched breads presented an increase in these parameters compared to traditional bread. In addition, the enrichment of breads with both bee products also showed an increase in their total phenolic and flavonoid contents, which was reflected by a significant increase in the antioxidant activity. The addition of these two products also affected properties such as water content, odor, colour, and overall appearance in bread, reflecting those differences in the physical properties of bread such as specific volume, colour, and texture. The change in the appearance of enriched breads also created differences in terms of consumer preferences. Sensory evaluation revealed, among all bread samples, the preference for bread enriched with 3% of bee bread, followed by 1% bee bread. The same pattern was observed for pollen enriched bread’s. Besides, the microbial activity tests showed that the use of both bee products had no major negative effect on food safety in breads. Consequently, this study shows that bee pollen and bee bread products have potential for usage in functional foods, with no modification in the basic properties of the enriched product. |