Effect of Selected Parameters on Process Efficiency and Energy Consumption During the Extrusion-cooking of Corn-rice Instant Grits

More and more people begin to pay attention to how foodstuffs are produced. Due to the changing lifestyle, consumers seek products that do not require long preparation. The extrusion-cooking process responds to this type of applications with an easy management of processing promising product stability and quality. Extrusion-cooking involves the extruding of granular material under high pressure and high temperature. Such a method of treatment of raw materials makes extrudates produced from natural ingredients, i.e. corn or rice, suitable for direct consumption and guarantees their prolonged shelf-life. In our study, mixtures for instant grits were prepared from corn with a rice additive of 25% and 50%. Extrudates were prepared using a single-screw extruder TS-45 (L/D=12:1). The range of the temperatures of the extrusion process was 125/130/135 °C. The process was carried out with the variable screw rotation speed of 80, 100 and 120 rpm. This paper presents the results of process efficiency and energy consumption during the extrusion-cooking of instant corn-rice grits. Based on a bidirectional analysis of variance, the process efficiency, regression equation and correlation coefficients were determined for evaluating the impact of the processing conditions on selected properties.