[Gluten-free cookies prepared with sorghum flour]

Considering that sorghum is a gluten free flour, it could be proposed as an ingredient to produce alternative bakery products for the subjects with Celiac Disease, since they do not have many food options available in the market. For this reason, the main goal of this study is to develop chocolate cookies with sorghum flour (Sorghum vulgare). The experimental design used was the simplex-lattice factor to compare the following variables: sorghum flour (50-100%), rice flour (0-50%) and corn starch (0-50%), totaling up to ten experiments. The formulations IX and X were selected as the ones with the highest sensorial scores The sorghum flour, regular chocolate cookies and gluten free cookies were submitted to physicochemical analysis. Physical and sensorial analysis using Quantitative Descriptive Analysis (QDA) and hedonic analysis were performed for the two cookies preparation. Sorghum flour presented characteristics compared with the described by the food regulation laws. The preparations that presented satisfactory sensorial characteristics were the ones that had 58 and 67% of sorghum flour, 8 and 17% of rice flour, 33 and 17% of corn starch, respectively. The performance for both IX and X formulations was 0,92 and the specific volume was 1,54 and 1.46 cm3/g, respectively. When compared with regular cookies, the differences on most of the sensorial attributes evaluated on sorghum cookies were not statistically significant (P < 0.05), except for the color and the odour. All the sensorial scores reached values equal or higher than 7 for both samples and most of them scored 8. The results showed the feasibility of including sorghum flour on the manufacture of gluten free cookies.