Ethanol byproduct enhancing flatbreads' nutrition

By DIRK LAMMERS

BROOKINGS, S.D.

Food scientists want to enlist a corn ethanol byproduct commonly used as cattle feed in the fight against world hunger.

South Dakota State University researchers have been cooking up versions of Asian flatbreads that are higher in protein and fiber by substituting dried distillers grains for up to 20 percent of the flour.

Food science Professor Padu Krishnan said the naan and chapati breads that he and graduate student Sowmya Arra have been making could help people in developing countries boost their fiber and protein intake.

"We have a shot at feeding the world," said Krishnan, a cereal chemist. "Right now, the world is hungry for useful proteins, and they don't have meat sources."

Chapati is an unleavened whole wheat flatbread common in parts of Asia. Naan, a white flour-based flatbread popular in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan, has a pizza crust-like feel.

Switching out 10 percent of the flour in chapati with food-grade distillers grains boosts the bread's fiber content from 2.9 percent to 7.8 percent and the protein from 10.5 to 12.9 percent. A 20-percent mix in the dough increases the fiber to 10.3 percent and the protein to 15.3 percent, the research found.

Chapati, which is cooked in a high-heat oven and puffs up, can be used for wraps or ripped apart as an edible utensil to grab other dishes.

Using distillers grains in the chapati dough reduces its chewiness, which makes it a makes it a better product for U.S. consumers. "People like the chewiness in India," Krishnan said. "When we put DDG in there, it gets less chewy. Most Americans don't like to work extra hard when they eat food."

Arra last year won a graduate research poster competition for her work on the project at the Institute for Food Technologists Conference in Anaheim, Calif., beating out 50 other graduate students.

Charlie Staff of the Distillers Grain Technology Council said research into distillers grains' use in food is vast, but the only commercial product he knows of is a bread mix made from Kentucky bourbon distillers grains.

Staff, executive director of the nonprofit industry group at the University of Louisville, said he'd like to see the product become a popular food ingredient, but it would need someone to establish a totally different distribution, sales and marketing program.

"It takes a bit of risk taking to do that," Staff said. "Plus there's a concern in the plants' minds that they don't have a food-grade plant and they'd have to make too many significant changes in their plant to be able to sell a food-grade product."

Some 30 million tons of distillers grains are produced each year, according to the council, but the grains are mostly fed to animals.

"Eventually we will eat that protein in the form of meat," Krishnan said.

The SDSU research has received support from the South Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station, the North Central Agricultural Research Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service and the South Dakota Wheat Commission.

Krishnan's goal is to put a little bit of distillers grains into the foods people already eat, which could eventually lead to more healthful sandwich breads, tortillas, noodles and cookies.

"We need the fiber," he said. "Our diet lacks fiber."