| Summary: | There is growing demand for functional foods and ingredients as a result of their health-promoting properties. In this work, the potential of common buckwheat flour (Supreme) and bran (Farinetta) in improving upon the phenolic and antioxidant properties of durum spaghetti was investigated. The effects of processing and cooking on these properties were also studied in addition to the cooking quality and carbohydrate digestibility of spaghetti products. Among uncooked spaghetti samples, there were huge increments of between 114 and 522% for TPC, 50 and 242% for TFC, 359 and 1000% for DPPH antioxidant activity, and 101 and 197% for ORAC values of the experimental spaghetti samples over the control. Farinetta contributed more phenolic and antioxidant compounds than Supreme flour. Processing resulted in losses ranging from 1.2 to 33.7% in TFC and 42.0 to 55.3% in DPPH antioxidant activity. Cooking also resulted in significant losses (p < 0.05) of up to 39% in TPC, 40% in DPPH antioxidant activity, 22% in rutin content, and 55% in TFC in experimental samples. Cooking losses of up to 8.82% were recorded for the experimental samples and were higher in Farinetta-substituted products. These were generally higher than that of the control (6.33%). The introduction of buckwheat increased carbohydrate digestibility of products, but at the same time resulted in an overall lower release of reducing sugars after of 120 min of in vitro hydrolysis. Results show that the phenolic and antioxidant properties of durum spaghetti fortified with buckwheat milling fractions can compare favourably with those of 100% whole buckwheat pasta, and at the same time, maintain a higher cooking quality due to the presence of semolina.
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