Time-Independent and Time-Dependent Rheological Characterization of Dispersions with Varying Contents of Chickpea...

The chickpea (Cicer arietinum) flour dispersions as the model system with different contents of flour (37% to 43%) and gum arabic (0% to 5%) were subjected to multiple loop experiments for simultaneous determination of the time-independent and time-dependent rheological characteristics. The Herschel-Bulkley model was suitable (0.993 ≤ r ≤ 0.999) to relate the time-independent characteristics linking shear stress and shear rate data for the individual upward and downward curves. The yield stress, consistency index, and apparent viscosity increased with the increasing flour and/or gum contents while flow behavior index (n) decreased. The yield stress generally decreased with the number of loops but n increased. In the individual loop tests, the n values for the decreasing shear stress/shear rate curves were always higher than corresponding increasing curves meaning a shift toward Newtonian characteristics. The time-independent properties (yield stress, apparent viscosity, consistency index, and n), the time-dependent characteristics like the area of the loop, and liquid characteristics like pourability and the nonoral sensory attributes (viscosity, spreadability, and tackiness) were individually predicted by artificial neural networks wherein the root mean square errors were between 3.6% and 17.2%. The sensory assessment indicated that the desirable parameters for a free-flowing and easily pourable spherical chickpea batter droplets occurred when the average pourability and spreadability values were 6.9 and 5.9, respectively. The normalized indices for these 2 parameters indicated that the batter having 40% flour and 2% gum contents was most suitable exhibiting a deviation of only 10% from the ideal sensory scores; these values were 40% and 0% to 3%, and 43% and 0%, respectively exhibiting up to 20% deviation.