STUDY OF SUNFLOWER FUNCTIONAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL PROTEIN PROPERTIES

The severe shortage of products rich in protein in the human diet leads to an intensive technological development of meat industry production that includes the optimal combination of both meat and non-meat vegetable protein-containing nutritives resulting in high-quality food. On this account, domestic meat producers are considering more and more often food protein derived from sunflower seeds as a source of vegetable protein. Due to the sunflowers having a high content of biologically complete proteins that have a wide range of functional and technological properties, the matter of sunflower proteins used as an ingredient to meat products is relevant and promising. As a result, taking into account the above stated, this area of focus has been chosen for further work. The article deals with the study of sunflower functional and technological protein properties. Taking into account how difficult it is to process sunflowers due to their high fat content, firstly, the sunflower protein swelling kinetics has been studied aiming to determine its swelling characteristics and recovery rate. The resulted data of swelling characteristics indicate that the maximum value of sunflower protein swelling boundary degree is 320%. The swelling rate, the swelling rate constant, the sunflower protein complete dissolution time and its optimal swelling temperature were determined at the initial stages of the process. While determining the emulsifying ability of sunflower protein powder, it has been observed that it is required to prepare a protein-based emulsion not only to carry out a continuous process of minced meat preparation, but also to significantly improve the product quality while applying it. The growing dynamics of the emulsion stability index with sunflower protein powder has been established. Physicochemical and functional and technological parameters of sunflower proteins have been studied, that have positive values and meet the requirements of the norms for these products. Therefore, the conducted research makes it state that it’s possible to use sunflower protein as a minced meat ingredient, and this is an urgent scientific and technical aim that determines how challenging the area of further work is while creating the next-generation meat products efficiently adding sunflower vegetable protein to their recipes