Meatballs are certainly not a symbol of balance and nutritional health.
The traditional ones are minced meat, generally deriving from several trimmings, with the addition of stale bread, eggs, cheese and spices. Most are fried, but stewed and baked meatballs are also popular.
Being a food coined to recycle leftovers or redundancies, meatballs also have a greater risk of hygienic nature.
Currently many variants have been proposed; some are based on fish (cod, salmon, tuna, etc.), others on cereals and / or legumes (chickpeas, rice, millet, etc.) or vegetables (aubergines, courgettes, etc.).
Obviously, the nutritional content fluctuates very much depending on the type of ingredients and the cooking method; the traditional ones are rich in calories, saturated fatty acids and cholesterol.
In this regard, a small experimental book was published that had as its objective the production of "dietetic" meatballs, that is healthier than the traditional ones.
This, entitled " Quality of low-fat meatballs containing Legume flours as extenders ", took into consideration meatballs formulated with black eye bean flour (BBF), chickpea flour (CF), lentil flour (LF) and rusks crumble (R) for 10% of the total.
Cooked and raw, the meatballs have been analyzed by measuring: humidity, fats, proteins and ashes (mineral salts). The firing properties and color parameters were also evaluated.
BBF and LF have induced a higher cooking yield, fat and moisture retention. Meatballs with LF were lighter than the other samples. Those formulated with BBF showed the least reduction in diameter. The meatballs with BBF and CF had a greater water retention capacity than the other treatment groups. All the meatballs that contain legume flour were more compact (lower penetration value) than those with R. According to the results of the sensory evaluation, they all enjoyed high acceptability and higher scores (6.8 or more ). At the 3rd month of storage in freezing at -18 ° C, the meatballs with BBF and CF obtained lower values than those with LF and R.
