## 3 Results and Discussion
### Physical and Chemical Properties
It was observed that the higher the concentration of carob is in a food product, the higher the phenolic concentration will be. For example, [PERSON] et al. (2018) reported that the addition of 42% carob flour in spread samples was 615.28 mg GAE/100 g, considerably higher compared to the results obtained in the current study, in which the highest addition content was 6% of carob powder. Additionally, [PERSON] et al. (2019) mentioned that the total phenol content of biscuit samples obtained with the addition of 25% carob flour was 5.53 g/kg biscuit compared to the sample with wheat flour, with 1.10 g/kg biscuit, and 1.60 g/kg of wheat whole grain flour. The present study reported a superior value of TPC for the sample containing carob flour in proportion of 6% (461.10 mg GAE/100 g) in contrast with the control sample, with 239.07 mg GAE/100 g. The increase in the total polyphenol content of the samples containing carob powder was closely related to the method for obtaining the carob powder, the amount of carob powder introduced into the products, the methodology used to obtain the products and the biochemical reactions developed in the product matrix ([PERSON] et al., 2012; [PERSON] et al., 2013; [PERSON] et al., 2014). The results shown in Table 4 show that fortifying pasta with carob increased the level of individual phenolic compounds. All analyzed compounds are present in the P6 CP sample, which contains the highest level of carob. Similar values were obtained when pasta was fortified with grape pomace ([PERSON] et al., 2013). The addition of 3-9% grape marc to the pasta recipe resulted in an increase of individual polyphenic compounds depending on the percentage added. For example, [PERSON] et al. (2013) reported the following values for individual polyphenols in pasta enriched with grape marc: gallic acid (27.95-88.22 \(\upmu\)g/g), caffeic acid (0.66-58.11 \(\upmu\)g/g), epicatchin (10.29-14.92 \(\upmu\)g/g), ocumamic acid (0. 32-0.85 \(\upmu\)g/g), ferulic acid (6.33-15.75 \(\upmu\)g/g), rutin (0.14-18.56 \(\upmu\)g/g), rosmarinic acid (26.1-38.53 \(\upmu\)g/g), resveratrol (31.15-34.38 \(\upmu\)g/g), quercetin (2.89-7.3 \(\upmu\)g/g), kaempfer (19.73-54.24 \(\upmu\)g/g). The addition of carob flour has been found to increase the content of polyphenols; however, the increase is not linear but exponential. This has been determined for quercetin, for which detectable values are available for all compositions. The increase may depend on the degree of mixing of the carob flour with the semolina dough and the distribution of these compounds in the flour. Our findings are consistent with those of other authors such as [PERSON] et al. [29], who have stated that the improvement with natural phenolics can be influenced by a lot of factors, among which includes binding with food matrix components. In addition, [PERSON] et al. [29] and [PERSON] et al. [28] specified that the content of bioactive compounds may be influenced by the combination of proteins and phenolics content, such as hydrophobic interactions and hydrogen and ionic bonding. [PERSON] et al. [54] conducted a study on the bioaccessibility of phenolics from carob pod powder prepared by cryogenic and vibratory grinding, and they showed that, from the 13 compounds involved in the UHPLC analysis, three were phenolic acids (vanillic, ferulic and cinnamic), three flavons (luteolin, apigenin and chrysoeriol), naringenin (flavanone) and quercitrin (glycosic form of flavonoid quercetin). The highest amount of quercitrin (44.54-64.68 \(\upmu\)g/g), cinnamic acid (27.48-31.40 \(\upmu\)g/g) and chrysoeriol (8.60-9.82 \(\upmu\)g/g) have been found. The amount of the rest of the phenolic constituents ranged from 1.88 to 10.14 \(\upmu\)g/g [55; 56; 57]. In our study, the highest number of compounds is also found in quercitrin, in P6 CP (243.66 \(\upmu\)g/g). The results shown in Table 4 show that fortifying pasta with carob increased the level of phenolic compounds.