Decreasing Food Waste with Potato Peel Powder

Food wastes and by-products have become concerned as according to Wadhwa and Bakshi (2013), by-products arise from fruits and vegetables cause environmental pollution as it either discarded into rivers or landfills or used as fertilizer. As potato is commonly used in the processing of food products worldwide, Md, Singh and Raghavan (2017) described that in 2018, potato is one of the most processed vegetables that give rise to more than 4.3 million tons by-product at Canada and USA and Wu (2016) stated that between 70 and 140 thousand tons of peels per year have resulted from industrial processing of all over the world. However, today, fruits and vegetable wastes are more likely served as functional products which help in reducing environmental impact emerged from those by-products (Bhat & Hafiza, 2016). Potato peel is generated in huge amount after processing of food product such as French fries and potato chips in Malaysia and worldwide. Also, potatoes are used as main or additional ingredients in many types of dishes in Malaysia; for instance, in curry puff and begedil. However, potato peel is usually removed and discarded. In addition, potato peels are mainly composed of alcohol-insoluble matter (Mahmood et al, 1998; Schieber & Saldaña, 2009) and approximately 45 % of dietary fibre (Arora & Camire, 1991; Camire & Flint, 1994).

Potato peel can be converted into powder and used in many kinds of food products. As potato peel is a good source of dietary fibre, the incorporation of it increases the nutritional quality of the product. Utilization of potato peel as a value-added product is beneficial as according to Toma et. Al. (1979), utilization of potato peel which is a by-product of commercial potato processing can greatly minimize waste pollution and it can also be a source of dietary fibre. Researches on the performance of potato peel powder incorporation in the baked products were considerably studied such as muffin, cookies (Arora & Camire, 1994), bread (Toma et al., 1979) and cake (Jeddou et al., 2017). Muffin added with potato peel was shown to be more preferable in term of darker in colour as baked products usually are dark in colour (Arora & Camire, 1994) and the most appetizing bread colour is the one that was supplemented with potato peel by hand peeling (Toma et al., 1979). Moreover, the products with potato peel powder showed an increase in protein content compared to the control product.

Jeddou et al. (2017) discovered that insoluble dietary fibre, soluble dietary fibre, and protein content were found to be increased with the increasing amount of potato peel added. He also found that cakes added with 10% potato peel flour have the highest amount of protein content. Most researches that were conducted before use unflavoured baked products. Steamed chocolate cake is a type of cake that does not require a baking process in an oven where it is made by steaming the cake dough; however, the cake dough is similar to other baked cake. The texture of the steamed chocolate cake is moister and softer compared to baked cake. Since the steamed chocolate cake is as good as baked cake, steamed chocolate cake is also considered as one type of desserts that people love. According to (Jeddou et al., 2017), almost all level of society chooses cakes as the most preferable bakery products due to its varieties, reasonable price and presence as ready-to-eat food. In Malaysia, steamed chocolate cake is becoming popular day by day which people mostly replace baked cake with steamed cake. The popularity of steamed chocolate cake should be taken advantage of; hence, incorporation of potato peel powder in steamed chocolate cake is a good opportunity to utilize potato by-product as a functional ingredient at the same time increase the nutritional quality of the steamed cake in term of dietary fibre content.