Sensory Acceptance of Malted and Un-Malted Barley Pretzels in South Punjab Sector of Pakistan

Barley (Hordeum vulgare) is a cereal crop, that belongs to the grass family. It is used as a food source in some cultures as well. The current research was planned to check the sensory acceptance of malted barley confection “pretzels”, which are not native to Pakistan. Purposely, the barley was procured from the local market of Multan, Pakistan by considering quality traits account i.e., colour, length, width, and thousand kernel weight. The cleaned barley was subjected to malting till seed germination for up to 4 days. After the process of germination, the seed was fried in the drier at 65 ℃ for 16 hours followed by flour development. The colour value of un-malted barley for l, a, and b were 54.23, 1.91, and 11.21 whilst malted barley presented 53.52, 0.86, and 11.03, respectively for the same traits. Afterwards, the pretzels were prepared by following the standard recipe by planning various treatments i.e., T0 (100% wheat flour), T1 (80% wheat flour, 20% malted flour), T2 (60% wheat flour, 40% malted flour), T3 (40% wheat flour, 60% malted flour), T4 (80% wheat flour, 20% un-malted flour), T5 (60% wheat flour, 40% un-malted flour) and T6 (40% wheat flour, 60% un-malted flour). The prepared products were subjected to sensory evaluation by a trained judges panel at different intervals during storage (0, 7th, and 14th day) by following a 9-point hedonic scale for aroma, texture, and overall acceptability. The malted barley-based pretzels 5.64±0.19 (T3) showed maximum value for aroma whereas, T5 presented 5.87±0.11 (T5) for the un-malted treatment plan on the 14th day. In the case of texture, T1 was appreciated at 0day of storage by securing 6.49±0.16. As far as overall acceptability was concerned, T6 presented 7.57±0.36 on the 0th day with a slight decline of 5.42±0.29 for the same treatment.