Quinoa is a food that has been termed one of the “grains of the 21st century”, due to its high nutritional value and tolerance by people with a wide range of food intolerances.
Additionally, quinoa has a high amount of high-quality protein, despite being a plant. This high nutritional value makes it an ideal base for gluten-free foods, however, due to the lack of gluten protein, it is not easily workable into a dough, making many food products from quinoa less appetizing.
Currently, quinoa is processed by typical food processing methods, such as steaming, baking, and extrusion. Microwave heating is another possible food processing technique that has shown to be more energy efficient at heating food as well as promoting protein aggregation. Protein aggregation, in sufficient quantities, could promote a strong, gluten-like protein network.
In the paper entitled, Intervention of microwave irradiation on structure and quality characteristics of quinoa protein aggregates, researchers describe the effects microwaves have on quinoa proteins using multiple analysis techniques. The authors used a Brookhaven Instruments NanoBrook 173Plus to characterize the particle size distribution of protein aggregates in microwaved and water bath heated quinoa protein solutions, and determined that the aggregates were larger and more disperse in microwave heated solutions. This indicates a new possibility for processing quinoa proteins.
Protein aggregation in this sense for food protein processing might be a good thing while protein aggregation for therapeutical injectables formulation is a bad thing.
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