Extrusion cooking is a versatile technology used to transform plant proteins into diverse value-added formats such as high-moisture meat analogues (HMMAs), texturized vegetable proteins (TVPs), and protein enriched puffed snacks. This presentation explores how extrusion parameters—including feed moisture content, barrel temperature profile, screw speed, and ingredient formulation—can be tailored to enhance the nutritional quality, especially protein digestibility, of extruded plant-based foods. Drawing on recent studies, we demonstrate that the structure and digestibility of extruded products are highly dependent on both processing conditions and raw material interactions. In HMMAs, increasing feed moisture and incorporating by-products like sunflower meal produced softer textures and preserved amino acid quality, while maintaining high in vitro protein digestibility corrected amino acid scores (IV-PDCAAS). For TVPs, manipulation of barrel temperature and moisture led to varied physical and techno-functional properties with minimal loss in protein digestibility. In puffed snacks made from cereal-pulse blends, extrusion improved protein quality and amino acid balance, and increased IVPD by up to 10%, particularly when high-protein legumes like lentils were used. This talk will highlight strategies for optimizing extrusion processing to enhance the nutritional density of plant-based foods. Learning objectives include: (1) understanding how extrusion affects protein digestibility and amino acid availability; (2) evaluating the trade-offs between texture and nutrition in different extruded food formats; and (3) identifying extrusion parameters that support clean-label, nutritionally enhanced plant-protein innovations. These insights are critical for advancing sustainable, high-quality protein product development in the agri-food sector.
Filiz Koksel is a food scientist with expertise in food processing and non-destructive assessments of food quality. Her research program aims to tackle issues related to an ever-increasing demand for sustainable high quality plant-based foods at the interface between food engineering and materials science. To bring Canadian crops from the field to our tables, Dr. Koksel’s program looks at several unit process operations involved - such as milling, mixing, baking, texturization and extrusion - in transforming these crops into foods with superb palatability and nutritional value.