Nutritional Efficacy Based Vegetables Selection for the Development of Ready to Cook Soup Mix Formulations

Vegetables are a good source of nutrients and after appropriate processing, they exhibit a great potential towards the development of ready-to-cook (RTC) food products. Among various RTC foods, vegetable soup mixes are gaining a fair demand due to their ease of preparation, consumption and acceptance by wider consumer groups. Thus, effective utilization of vegetable produce will help in the development of nutritionally rich soup mix formulations. In this regard, a holistic characterization of twelve abundantly produced Indian vegetables such as gourds and beans to identify their potentiality towards the development of RTC soup mixes was carried out. For this, sensitivity of moisture content, yield and important nutritional characteristics such as antioxidant activity, total phenolic content, vitamin C, soluble protein and crude fiber in due course of heat treatments namely hot water blanching and tray drying was investigated. Initially, vegetables were dried for 12 h and the moisture content and antioxidant activity were evaluated at 1 h intervals from 6th hour onwards to infer upon the optimal drying time. Further, other nutritional parameters were evaluated for all the vegetables treated at their corresponding optimal drying time. From the findings, it was observed that among all the summer and winter vegetables, pointed gourd; spine gourd; yardlong bean and ash gourd; bitter gourd; bottle gourd possessed highest nutrients respectively.