Stu­dents whip up crispy crack­ers from waste product

For sev­er­al weeks, the food engin­eer­ing stu­dents car­ried out lab tests to see if it is pos­sible to cre­ate a snack that can be mass pro­duced, is plant-based, has a high pro­tein con­tent and con­tains no added/​low levels of sug­ar and sat­ur­ated fat – and that also tastes good. ​“We chose to make crack­ers out of chick­peas, as they con­tain a lot of pro­tein. When we mixed in the water we used to boil the chick­peas, the crack­ers became per­fectly crispy and light in tex­ture, exactly what we were after”, says Oliva Arbab, a food engin­eer­ing stu­dent at Lund Uni­ver­sity. Now she and her class­mates hope that the food industry will adopt the trend of using emul­si­fied veget­able water. ​“It’s no more com­plic­ated than using egg whites. There is prob­ably quite a lot of wastage of aquafaba in both res­taur­ants and food com­pan­ies. I think that aquafaba is a rel­at­ively unex­plored ingredi­ent for the food industry. How­ever, the crux may be that the chick­peas must also be used for some­thing, oth­er­wise it will become an unsus­tain­able product”, says Olivia Arbab. The stu­dents’ recipe has been developed so that the whole amount of chick­peas per volume of chick­pea water is used to elim­in­ate poten­tial food waste. If they had just added water, com­ments Olivia Arbab, the crack­ers would have felt very hard when dried. If they had not added any liquid there would have been no bind­ing of the crack­ers at all, and it would have just been a powder. Oil would have worked – but then there is the issue of added fat. ​“There are of course both len­til and chick­pea crisps already, but they con­tain high amounts of fat and are deep fried.” ​“Our snacks are not com­pet­ing with crisps, because the taste is very neut­ral for the moment. And per­haps you don’t want to eat a snack at three o’clock on a Tues­day after­noon that tastes of sour cream and onion”, says Olivia Arbab. Aquafaba is cur­rently used to a lim­ited extent by the food industry, which uses the liquid as a sub­sti­tute for eggs in may­on­naise and cer­tain sand­wich top­pings.
​“The stu­dents show that aquafaba can be used for much more, for example to give an attract­ive struc­ture and tex­ture to snacks”, says Fed­erico Gomez, a lec­turer in food tech­no­logy and the stu­dents’ super­visor. The student’s crack­ers con­tain, among oth­er things, aquafaba, chick­peas, car­rots and dried nettles. The group mem­bers are Anna Nieto, Shubha Vasavada, Xue Lin, Sera Jac­ob, Haftom Gebregergs, Guil­laume Dive and Olivia Arbab.
About aquafaba:
The liquid from boiled beans and chick­peas con­tains approx­im­ately 1.5 per cent pro­teins. The pro­teins are sur­fact­ants to a vary­ing extent, which means that they can come between the liquid and air bubbles – there­fore, the air bubbles do not burst. This explains why aquafaba can be whisked into a foam. Source: Lund Uni­ver­sity, press release, 28.03.2019