What role does millet-based traditional and modern food processing technology play in enhancing the accessibility, taste, and convenience of millets, and how can food industries innovate to popularize millet-based products among diverse consumer groups?
In many cultures, millets have been used to prepare traditional dishes like porridge, flatbreads, and fermented foods. Traditional processing techniques help improve the flavor profile, such as through fermentation, which can make the millet products more palatable and suited to local tastes.
Modern food technologies, such as roasting, extrusion, and fermentation, allow manufacturers to improve the taste and texture of millet products. For example, puffed millet or millet-based snacks (like chips or bars) have an appealing crunchy texture, while millet flour can be made into soft, fluffy bread or cakes. This expands the versatility of millet products and makes them suitable for a wider variety of palates.
To further enhance taste, food manufacturers can innovate by adding spices, herbs, or other flavoring agents to millet-based products. This helps make millets more attractive to people who may not have a strong cultural connection to millet-based foods.
Modern food grain harvesting, storage, handling, and processing have improved with technology able to prevent, detect and segregate contamination. Millets are a dense grain. For example, rice expands 3X when cooked compared to proso millet at 3.5-4X. Millets are a relatively heavy grain taking up less storage and transportation space thereby saving transportation costs on their journey to distant processors which was unlikely a half-century ago.
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