Prelimenary Study of Instan Banana Flake Production Ira Mulyawanti and S Joni Munarso
Indonesian Center for Agricultural Postharvest Research and Development
Abstract
Banana is carbohydrate-sourced horticultural products. Besides having adequate carbohydrate content, bananas also contain vitamins (provitamin A, B and C) and also minerals (especially potassium) that are beneficial to health. Traditionally, bananas are processed by steaming, frying, or roasting. Processing bananas into flour has been done a lot. However, the flouring process causes the loss of more nutritional components in bananas. One of the development of banana products is to process them into instant banana flake. Instant banana flake was processed through the process of stripping, flaking, soaking in a solution of CaCl2, steaming, freezing, and drying. As instant food, rehydration time needs to be considered. This condition will be affected by gelatinization of starch and removal of water to produce products with a porous structure and will easily absorb water. Initial research was conducted to study the effectiveness of the steaming process involving gelatinization of starch on the morphological structure and amorphous products produced. Observation of the morphological structure was analyzed using scanning electron microscopic (SEM), while the percentage of crystallinity and amorphous were analyzed using XRD. Based on morphological and amorphous structures, instant banana flake by steaming for 30 minutes results in the best instant banana flake after being rehydrated with a rehydration time of 5 minutes and a ratio of sawut to water of 1: 3.
