## 4 Discussion
### Cooking Process  
Cooking losses are one of the fundamental variables used to predict pasta cooking quality. As shown in Tables 1 and 2, the cooking process significantly affected the nutritional and chemical profile of the studied pastas. The control pasta exhibited a decrease in fat content (15.2%) and a significant increase in ash content (2.2 times more). One of the causes for these variances could be due to the cooking process, as the flour matrix absorbs water and the starch granules enlarge, shedding their hard structure and releasing soluble chemicals. Despite that, no differences (\(p>0.05\)) were observed in protein and carbohydrate contents. Likewise, the cooking process affected calendula-enriched pasta by increasing the amount of ash (1.87 times), total fat (1.11 times), and crude protein (1.12 times). In this study, the highest cooking loss value was observed for total carbohydrates in fortified pasta (\(\sim\)2.3%), while control pasta presented significantly higher cooking losses in fat content (\(\sim\)15.2%). Cooking loss occurs when amylose leaks from starch granules during cooking, resulting in an unpleasant sticky texture. Thus, it is widely used as an indicator of overall cooking efficiency, demonstrating the resistance of disintegration during cooking pasta. Although cooking time optimization was not carried out in this study, the evaluation of the cooking process is one of the crucial factors in pasta, displaying how much solid material is lost in the boiling water. According to industry guidelines, nutritional losses in cooked pasta should not exceed a technological level greater than 8% [57], a level that this investigation was unable to obtain. Consequently, it is recommended that the cooking time should be optimized in a future investigation. The preservation of bioactive compounds, including natural pigments, after cooking is an important factor in the validation of pasta enrichment techniques, as they can interfere negatively due to losses caused by leaching or chemical hydrolysis degradation at high temperatures. Furthermore, color stability is one of the most important organoleptic attributes when it comes to colored food products. Thus, the color difference between raw and cooked pasta is one observation regarding organoleptic variables. As shown in Table 2, fresh calendula pasta was characterized by a high content of total phenolics (2.23 mg GAE/g) and flavonoids (3.86 mg CE/g) and a high antioxidant capacity, determined by DPPH assay. Likewise, cooking affected the contents of bioactive compounds in the enriched pasta, with a decrease in total phenolics (\(-50.7\%\)) > anthocyanins (\(-12.2\%\)) > flavonoids (\(-3.9\%\)). Antioxidant activity also decreased (\(-14.1\%\)). Therefore, it can be concluded that thermal processing is responsible for the variations in antioxidant activity and phenolic contents. In this study, it is more likely that the phenolic compounds released during the boiling process are compounds from calendula, and not from wheat, due to its high total phenolic contents (8.36 mg GAE/g). It is accurate to state that variances in phenolic content as well as the quantities of phenolic compounds may be linked to variations in antioxidant activity. Future research should focus on analyzing specific phenolic profiles to better understand the correlation between antioxidant activity and phenolic composition in calendula. Remarkably, cooking increased the enriched pasta's carotenoid concentration by 38.5%. Large levels of carotenoids are accumulated in calendula flower petals, namely, \(\beta\)-carotene, lutein, luteoxanthin, flavoxanthin, violaxanthin, rubixanthin, \(\gamma\)-carotene, and lycopene, the predominant ones in this species. Heating is related to pigment degradation as well as to increasing their extractability due to the dissolution of protein-carotenoid complexes, which supports our findings. [PERSON] et al.