ABSTRACT

Malnutrition is a serious problem in society especially among children, often it is associated with protein deficiency. Fortifying food with protein could help reduce the risk of malnutrition. Carbohydrate-rich foods like custard have always had a need to be complemented with a protein source for nutritional balance.Custard formulation of accepted quality relative to those made from corn-starch was produced from maize, millet, and soybeans. These formulation were blended in the ratio of 80:10:10, 70:15:15, 60:20:20, 90:5:5, 80:10:10 respectively. The resulting blends were analyzed for proximate, functional properties, vitamin composition, mineral composition, and sensory characteristics. From the findings, it was observed that custard formulation fortified with soybean flour had the higher protein, fat, crude fiber, ash, and vitamin content and also sample 101(80% corn-starch, 10% millet flour and 10% defatted soybean) ranked the best in all the samples while sample 104(90% corn-starch, 5% millet flour and 5% defatted soybean) had the least in all the samples. The proximate composition showed a slight difference in all the samples ranging from 366.20% to 401.74% for energy value,7.89% to 8.63% for Moisture content, 4.48% to 11.68% for Crude protein,0.32% to 3.46% for Fat content,0.15% to 0.18% for crude fiber,0.81% to 1.88% for ash content,90.35% to 80.97% for charbohydrate content respectively. The vitamin composition showed that Vitamin A, Vitamin Bi (Thiamine), VitaminB2 (Riboflavin) ranged from 1.39pg/100g to 1.39pg/100g for Vitamin A,0.22pg/100g to 0.40pg/100g for Vitamin B2 ,0.66mg/100g to 0.95mg/100g for Vitamin B2 respectively. The sample control had the lowest Vitamin Bi content. The functional composition showed that bulk density, water absorption capacity, solubility ranged from 0.77mg/100g to 0.74mg/100g, 1.02g/ml to 1.01g/ml,1.42g/g to 1.32g/g. The sensory evaluation performed on different samples of custard formulation after reconstitution into gruel with boiling water showed that the formulation 80:10:10 which was fortified with 10% soybean flour was the most accepted in the samples but still ranked lower than the commercial product.