Statistically, there is a high dependence on snacks in Nigeria for everyday food. This has made the production of snacks a lucrative venture in Nigeria thereby putting enormous pressure on the technological innovation of snacks production. A baking oven which is a thermally insulated cavity is the most widely used appliance in the food service industry, snacks inclusive. However, most ovens used in Nigeria for snacks production at the small/cottage industrial level are usually limited in one way or the other, hence this work. In this work, an oven with a capacity to bake 100 loaves of bread each weighing 200g was designed. The oven has a dual heating source with a top and down heating grills that is powered using a domestic cooking gas. Its dimensions are (1800 x 600 x 600) mm for height, length and width. The oven had a see-through window and a heat sensor to monitor the progress of the food being baked and the temperature respectively, without necessarily opening the door during operation. The oven had the heating capacity of 19.4 KW and cooking energy efficiency (CEE) of 70.79%. The organoleptic properties of the breads baked in the oven showed that a bread with high sensory attributes can be baked with the developed oven as there was no significant difference between the bread baked with the oven and the control of similar recipe baked in a conventional oven. The oven was therefore found suitable and convenient for baking cookies at the level of small/cottage industries.

This study was an attempt to produce soymilk from an intermediate Soy Product (ISP) to overcome the challenges of the traditional wet milling procedure. Seeds of Soybean (Glycine max) were dry-milled into soybean flour and constituted into soymilk by steeping the milled soybean flour sample into three different periods of SB1, SB2 and SB3 for 1hour, 3hour and 6hours respectively at ambient temperature. The steeped intermediate soy product was then finally processed into soymilk by filtering through a muslin cloth and each filtrate pasteurised at 700c for 30 minutes. The resulting soymilk from this process was then subjected to sensory, proximate and mineral analysis. A soymilk produced using the traditional (wet-milling) method, TPS and a commercial soymilk CBS was used as standard control. The mean values from the analysis were subjected to analysis of variance (ANOVA) at 5% level of significance using SPSS 17.0 for Windows. Significance was established at 95% confidence limit and mean were separated using Duncan test. Considering the organoleptic properties of the samples, sample CBS (commercial control sample) showed a significant difference from the rest of the laboratory samples in all the parameters evaluated (at P<0.05). However, samples SB1, SB2, SB3 and TPS were not significantly different from one another regardless of the processing methods and conditions. The proximate analysis from the soymilk samples showed that the sample steeped for 3hours (SB2) and sample TPS were significantly not different and had the highest values in protein (3.05%), fat (4.05%) and ash (0.50%) than all the other samples at (P<0.05); whereas the sample soaked for 6hours (SB3) was significantly higher in moisture content (84.45%) and Fibre (0.21%) and CBS was significantly higher in carbohydrate (15.67%). The mineral analysis of the soymilk also reviewed that the sample soaked for 3hours (SB2) was significantly higher in calcium (44.45Mg/100g), magnesium (48.86Mg/100g) and iron (1.11Mg/100g), whereas the sample soaked for 1hour (SB1) was significantly higher in zinc and copper (6.54 and 0.24Mg/100g) respectively. This work, therefore, reveals that soymilk of acceptable organoleptic, proximate and mineral qualities can be obtained using the method of an intermediate soy product (ISP).