Injera Making Quality Evaluation of Tef and Cassava Composite Flour

Tef is indigenous Ethiopian cereal crop while cassava is a high carbohydrate-containing crop recently introduced to Ethiopia. Injera is the staple food to Ethiopians mostly prepared from tef as the main ingredient. This was a research done by partially substituting tef, relatively expensive flour, by cassava flour and evaluated its injera making quality. Tef and cassava flours were mixed in all possible ratios at 10% intervals. Functional properties, sensory evaluations and proximate compositions were estimated using standard methods. Except water absorption capacity, all other functional properties were significantly varied with changing proportion of tef and cassava flours. The sensory acceptability of tef-cassava injera was significantly decreased in all parameters with increasing proportion of cassava flour. Tef-cassava injera contained 7.59 to 9.41% moisture, 0.65 to 1.87% ash, 0.40 to 1.02% crude fat, 3.79 to 11.89% protein, 1.10 to 3.05% crude fiber, 75.73 to 83.54% carbohydrate and 349.45 to 364.45 energy/100g. As cassava flour substitution levels increase, most flour functional properties increased, whereas sensory characteristics and proximate composition parameters (protein, fat, ash and energy) decreased. It was concluded that up to 40% cassava could be incorporated with tef to make injera with slightly acceptable sensory quality and fair nutritional value. Further research is required with regard to quality of injera as affected by other factors like maturity stages of cassava and the like.