# Development of a New Pasta Product by the Incorporation of Chestnut Flour and Bee Pollen
## 2 Materials and Methods
### Pasta Formulation and Preparation
#### 2.1.1 Preliminary Essays  
In the first stage, it was necessary to select the pasta recipe with the best performance in order to be able to incorporate the chestnut flour and pollen powder under the best conditions. Therefore, a basic pasta recipe was optimized to serve as control. The basic flours used were wheat flour T55, wheat flour T65 and wheat semolina. Wheat flour type 55 in a fine flour, often used in many culinary preparations, white bread, pastries and pasta. Flour T 65 has a slightly higher granulometry, and semolina is a type of flour made from durum wheat. The three types of flour mentioned above were tested first with water and then with egg, for fresh pasta and dry pasta. The quantities used obeyed the proportion of a half quantity of water or egg for the quantity of flour or semolina. The formulations to optimize the control (FC) pasta were as follows:  
FC1--50 g water + 100 g wheat flour T 55 FC2--50 g water + 100 g wheat flour T 65 FC3--50 g water + 100 g wheat semolina FC4--50 g egg + 100 g wheat flour T 55 FC5--50 g egg + 100 g wheat flour T 65 FC6--50 g egg + 100 g wheat semolina  
For the production of the pasta, the ingredients were mixed by hand, then pressed and cut in a home pasta-shaping machine (Figure 1). For higher homogenization and better rheological performance, the pasta was passed through the shaping machine several times, after folding in perpendicular directions each time. The machine allows adjusting the thickness of the pasta from 1 (thinner) to 6 (thicker).  
The six obtained pasta samples are shown in Figure 2, in fresh form and after drying in a chamber at 40 \({}^{\circ}\)C for 12 h to evaluate if the drying operation would influence the properties of the pasta. The cooking time was established as a base of 10 min in boiling water (for 150 g of pasta was used 3 L of water, to which was added 1.5 g of salt) (Figure 3). Nevertheless, the samples were tested by the cooker to verify if this pre-established cooking time would be the adequate to achieve the desirable status of \"al dente\". Cooking was carried out with precision by respecting the standardized protocol (NF ISO 7304) in order to make it possible to compare the different samples. After cooking, the pasta was poured into a sieve and drained.  
The six formulations were evaluated in both alternatives (cooked fresh and cooked after drying) through a qualitative assessment, made by the laboratory technicians handling the samples, in order to evaluate the most promising formulation(s) for the desired objectives, i.e., to proceed to the next step of the research. The evaluations for each of the attributes evaluated (color, easy to manipulate without breaking, sticky, taste, texture in mouth, texture in hand) were made on a scale as follows: very unsatisfactory (\(-\) ), unsatisfactory (\(-\)), satisfactory (\(+\)), good (\(++\)), very good (\(++\)) as summarized in Table 1. These preliminary results allowed the choosing of the best formulations for the control pasta recipe. Hence, for the next experiments, the two recipes chosen as control were FC2 (with water) and FC4 (with fresh egg), considering the overall performance either fresh or dried. In these two cases, the dough was easy to manipulate and not too sticky, and the pasta had a pleasant taste, a tender texture, good cooking ability and an attractive color.  
Figure 1: Pasta preparation: (**a**) dough obtained after mixing the ingredients; (**b**) shaping of the pasta; (**c**) shaped pasta obtained; (**d**) pasta after being cut into strips.  
Figure 2: Preliminary pasta samples: fresh and dried.