The Use of Common Bean and Mesquite Pods Flours as Partial Substitute of Semolina, Impact of Their Proteins and Polysaccharides in the Physical, Chemical, and Microstructural Characteristics of Spaghetti Pasta

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In recent years there has been an increased interest in the search for new sources of raw materials for the enrichment of pasta products. There are several reasons for this, firstly, pasta is a food product known and popular all over the world, due to its nutritional value, long shelf life, ease of preparation, versatility of use, as well as relatively low cost, and secondly, the demand of consumers for products with a balanced composition and functional properties, low glycemic index is constantly increasing.

A number of creative teams have obtained good results when enriching pasta with waste from the production of watermelon rind (Long DQ. et al., 2024). All these works indicate that pasta is a product characterised by a flexible technological matrix. This allows scientific communities in different countries to search for authentic adaptogenic sources of plant raw materials to create unique technologies of pasta products, physiologically justified for a certain population.

The article submitted to the editorial board is devoted to the development of pasta technology with the addition of protein pea isolate and mesquite flour and the study of their physicochemical and microstructural characteristics. Mesquite pods in Mexico have long been used in food. A number of papers  have investigated the use of mesquite flour, but there are no studies on the possibility of using mesquite flour in pasta products, which justifies the relevance of this study.

However, there are a number of issues to be clarified on the article:

1)   In paragraph 2 Materials and methods, the authors describe the production of mesquite flour. To what extent can this technological process be adapted to industrial conditions and is it economically feasible?

2)    Drying of pasta products is an important technological process. Such indicators of the quality of finished products as strength, vitreousness in the break, acidity largely depend on the modes of drying. In production practice, various methods of drying are used. The term drying mode is understood as a set of drying air parameters (temperature, relative humidity, air velocity) and duration of drying. Optimal mode of drying of a certain type of pasta is considered to be such a mode, which produces products of normal quality with the shortest drying time and energy consumption. The authors do not explain  the rationale for the choice of the temperature range of 50 and 60 ° C. The parameters of relative humidity are not described. The parameters of relative humidity and air velocity are not described.

3) In paragraph 2 Materials and methods there is no description of the pasta stabilisation process. Did the authors take into account this important technological moment, which may affect the final result of the work?  The minimum duration of stabilisation is 4 h, and the products should be bathed in air with a temperature of 25-30 °C and relative humidity of 60-65 %.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors,

The manuscript about “The use of common bean and mesquite pods flours as partial substitute of semolina, impact of their proteins and polysaccharides in the physical, chemical, and microstructural characteristics of spaghetti pasta” is interesting. In my opinion, the manuscript should be revised once more after several corrections. Below are some suggestions, but there are more typos and incorrections in the manuscript body:

1)     Please correct the author list after the title. Some of them have no institution attributed.

2)     Please enhance the abstract sentence: “Proximate composition, trypsin inhibitors, culinary properties, water absorption, texture profile, color, soluble protein, and protein and starch digestibility, Raman and confocal microscopy were made.”. There are three ands at the end.

3)     The first sentence of the introduction can have a stop mark instead of a ;.

4)     Can the final purpose of the work be clearer near the introduction sentence “was to evaluate the effect of the partial substitution of semolina by mesquite pods flour and pea protein isolate in the techno-functional characteristics of the spaghetti pasta”?

5)     In line 95 there’s an n missing in the end of “Spaghetti pasta preparatio”.

6)     In line 119 a stop mark is needed before the word “Briefly…”. The manuscript really needs to be revised. It’s not acceptable that a manuscript with so many authors has so many mistakes. Each author should read the hole manuscript and help proofreading.

7)     Please correct in line 232 “in comparison to the reported by […],”

8)     Note that all figures and tables should be cited in the main text of the manuscript. For instance, Figure 1 is not cited.

9)     In Figure 6 there’s no b). These graphics and the following should be enhanced as they have some numbers cut.

10) Please correct Figure 9 caption: Where it reads: “…(C50);…” it should read: “…(S50);…” and the same for C60 (alternatively you can change the S50 and 60 in the figure). Where it reads: “…A, B, C, D. E, F…” it should read: “…A, B, C, D, E, F …”. A caps lock R should be used in the last sentence in the word rectangles.

11) Check all the references. Some are not according to MDPI citation rules.

All the best.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The English can be improved if all authors (or eventually some external collaborators) put some effort into reviewing the manuscript.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx