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Abstract

This work was necessitated due to rising costs of vital ingredients such as milk powder, sugar and vitamin-mineral mix in formulating a peanut-based ready-to-use therapeutic spread, saviour for severely malnourished children. Development of a new spread with particle size ≤ 158µm from roasted tigernut (Cyperus esculentus) flour, roasted soy (Glycine max) flour, soyoil (10mg Vit A/Kg) and other ingredients were investigated. Appropriately treated flours with better physicochemical features from whole tigernut and soybean with particle sizes ≤ 450µm were used in developing the spreads. Optimized tigernut-based spreads were well accepted and had an excellent colour, flavour, smoothness, aftertaste, spreadability and sweetness. This work shows that a high calorie (8.512 -11.647 Kcal/g) tigernut-based spreads containing added sugar (≤ 6%) and iodated salt (50ppm,≤ 0.3%) could be produced as a food aid for malnourished people.