Legumes offer a rich source of proteins as well as benefiting the soil fertility by fixing nitrogen. Vicia faba var. minor, or tick or faba beans as they are commonly called, are a legume species that have a variety of application in animal feeds but are rarely found in food products. Currently, the crop is mainly used for animal feed and as a break crop to disrupt disease cycles, typically in small grain cereal monoculture. The seeds from the crop are harvested dry but the crop typically has a relatively low value uses for a nutritionally valuable grain. The objective of this investigation was to produce an extruded snack product from faba beans that would be acceptable to consumers. We developed an experimental design to optimise the manufacturing conditions of a crisp expanded snack product from the finely milled seed. The snacks were manufactured on a small twin screw extruder (Clextral BC21). The physical properties of the snacks were altered by varying the screw speed, the particle size of the flour, presence or absence of the hull component of the beans and the variety of tick bean. The physical properties of the snacks were analysed using a SMS TaXT2+ texture analyser. Sensory analysis was conducted using a taste panel. The faba bean products were compared to commercially available snacks purchased from the supermarket. An extruded faba bean product was developed that had similar physical properties and a high level of consumer acceptance compared to the commercially available extruded corn snacks. The faba bean snacks contained more than three times the protein and four times the fibre of the extruded corn products. This product is considered to have good potential as a snack food and may assist with the development of a high value market for this potentially valuable crop

The model food in this study known as mashed potato consisted of ribose (1.0%) and lysine (0.5%) to induce browning via Maillard reaction products. Mashed potato was processed by Coaxially Induced Microwave Pasteurization and Sterilization (CiMPAS) regime to generate an F0 of 6–8 min and analysis of the post-processed food was done in two ways, which included by measuring the color changes and using hyperspectral data acquisition. For visualizing the spectra of each tray in comparison with the control sample (raw mashed-potato), the mean spectrum (i.e., mean of region of interest) of each tray, as well as the control sample, was extracted and then fed to the fitted principal component analysis model and the results coincided with those post hoc analysis of the average reflectance values. Despite the presence of a visual difference in browning, the Lightness (L) values were not significantly (p < 0.05) different to detect a cold spot among a range of 12 processed samples. At the same time, hyperspectral imaging could identify the colder trays among the 12 samples from one batch of microwave sterilization.