Real time quality control of dried semolina pasta and egg pasta processing using at-line FT-NIR Spectroscopy

Worldwide pasta markets are continuously growing, driven by the convenience needs of busy consumers and well-being and health issues. Globalization and increasing competition in the pasta industry make quality criteria more important in response to technological advances in pasta processing, market pressure and consumer preference. Moreover customers are becoming more discriminating in their quality requirements, and variability in product quality is becoming less acceptable, particularly for premium products. The manufacturing of pasta is subject to strict regulations for food production, and from ingredients to final products, quality controls are strictly mandatory. Nowadays, chemical-physical analysis are still expensive and provide results of the considered parameters after several days from sampling. Methods based on NIR spectroscopy coupled to chemometric analysis has been used for years, being successful in modelling many quality variables, thanks to its rapidity and the possibility to simultaneously measured several parameters. In this study at-line NIR spectroscopy has been applied to overall quality control of semolina flour (moisture, ash, protein, gluten content, gluten index and damaged starch), dried semolina pasta (moisture, ash, protein, gluten content, gluten index, percentage of damaged starch, cooking quality), dried egg pasta (fat content, gluten content, number of eggs, sterols, cooking quality), whole egg and egg yolk (moisture, fat, sterols, lactic acid content and natural pigments). Moreover, quantitative calibration has been attempted on 30 dried semolina pasta samples of different origin as to evaluating the cooking quality by means of NIR analysis, avoiding the time-consuming traditional assays. Regression coefficients were >0.99 for all parameters. FT-NIR spectra were collected using NIRFLex N-500 (Büchi, Switzerland) and all chemometric analysis, including quantitative and qualitative calibration, were performed using NIRCal 5.0 (Buchi, Switzerland). All results will be presented and discussed.