Nutritional Properties of Cocoyam Flour as Influenced by some Processing Parameters.

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of some processing parameters (blanching time, X1, drying temperature, X2 and drying time, X3) on some anti-nutritional properties (oxalate and tannins) of cocoyam flour. A-three factor central composite design (CCRD) was employed to process cocoyam samples into flour. Analysis of variance indicates that the linear, quadratic and interaction effects of X1, X2 and X3 significantly (p<0.05) affected the anti-nutritional properties evaluated. Oxalate content of the cocoyam flour samples showed a significant difference (P<0.05) with increase in drying temperature. Blanching and drying time had no significant effect on the oxalate content of the flour, as their values tend to be higher than 0.05. Tannin content of the cocoyam flour samples showed significant difference (P<0.05) with increase in drying temperature and time. The regression analysis for tannin indicated that the linear effect of the drying temperature affected the tannin content significantly (P < 0.05). The regression models fitted to the experimental data showed that the R2 values were 0.53 and 0.91 for oxalate and tannins respectively. Based on the desirability concept (0.581), the optimal conditions obtained for process variables and anti-nutritional properties of the cocoyam flour were, blanching time 5mins, drying temperature 77.28OC, drying time 14hr, 11.1mg/g for oxalate and 18.0184mg/g for tannins.