Agricultural alchemy: Transforming health with pulse-enriched beetroot soup mix

In view of the importance of beetroot, evaluation of pulse enriched beetroot soup mix was carried out. The physical properties of beetroot include the mass, length, colour, diameter and shape has found that 180 g, 16.25 g, dark red colour, 5.43 cm and round shape respectively. Beetroot powder were prepared by blanching and unblanching. Blanched beetroot powder has scored high in sensory evaluation due to enhanced colour and appearance. Different variation of pulse enriched soup mix was formulated with blanched and unblanched beetroot powder to be at 5 and (10%) and pulses at (15%) each i.e., whole blackgram and whole greengram. Commercially available vegetable knoor soup was considered as control. The result showed that (5%) of blanched beetroot powder enriched soup was accepted in all the parameters that includes appearance, colour, texture, taste, overall acceptability found to be 9.0, 9.5, 8.5, 9.2, 9.5 respectively, compared to all the variations. The moisture, carbohydrates, fibre, fat, protein and potassium of best accepted product was 3.2 g, 8.9 g, 1.5 g, 1.6 g and 30 mg, respectively. Shelf life study was carried out to check the keeping quality of pulse enriched beetroot soup mix. The results showed that up to 15 days all the variations of soup mixes showed no increase in moisture content and showed greater sensory scores compared to 30^th day. It could be concluded that the results of this study clearly demonstrated the usefulness of supplementing dried vegetarian soup mixture with beetroot powder as a valuable food addition to enhance nutritional characteristics and technological quality of the resultant soup.