Multi millets based traditional food mixes

People of India consuming most of their foods in traditionally processed forms. However their preparation is time consuming and laborious with result that convenience foods based on traditional processing has entered the market with huge success. Small millets has high nutrient content which includes protein, essential fatty acids, dietary fibre, vitamins, minerals. It helps in rendering health benefits like reduction in blood sugar level, blood pressure regulation, cardiovascular and celiac diseases. Processing of small millets based instant food mixes would be successful strategy to promote millet utilization. Hence, the present investigation was undertaken to standardized nutritious instant breakfast mixes from small millets with other ingredients. Multi millet grain mix was formulated using grains of kodo millet, little millet, foxtail millet and barnyard millet. These formulated mixes was substituted with different proportions in traditional instant food mixes viz., Idli, Dosa, Pittu, Adai, paniyaram, chappathi and Venpongal. Which were organoleptically evaluated with 50 volunteers using 9 point hedonic scale. The result revealed that the standardized products obtained overall acceptability scores of Idli (8.5± 0.14), Dosa (8.6±0.14), Pittu (8.4±0.46) and Adai (8.7± 0.23), Paniyaram (8.6±0.21), chappathi (8.8±0.25) and Venpongal (8.8±0.20) and the entire products were maximum acceptability. With respect to nutrient content the standardized products contains high amount of protein, dietary fibre and iron content. This contributes food and nutritional security by meeting energy and protein needs of consumer. The instant mixes from multi millets can help in increasing food availability, adding variety to it and make the diet rich in micronutrients and satisfy the demand of small millets processed foods.