Vitamin retention in extruded food products

Abstract

Crisp extruded snack food like products were produced from a range of cereal products using a short barrel, single screw snack food extruder. The retention of B group vitamins during extrusion processing was compared for the different cereal grains and under different extrusion conditions. This work showed that short barrel extruders used for snack food production retain between 44% and 62% of the B group vitamins. This is considerably higher than the 20% retention for maize reported previously for long barrel extruders. The stability of the vitamins was similar, with riboflavin and niacin having the highest stability. Pyridoxine was stable in maize, but less so in oats and the maize+pea ingredients. Thiamin was the least stable during extrusion. It is concluded that short term high-temperature cooking of extruded snacks allows the retention of higher levels of heat labile B vitamins than the longer time and lower temperature cooking methods used in modern snack food extruders.