CHAPTER ONE1.0              INTRODUCTION

Pumpkin is a common name of the genus cucurbitae of the Gourd Family.  It includes the pumpkins and squashes.  Although the names are often used interchangeably, pumpkins in the United Kingdom usually refer to cucurbita maximum and it’s varieties, in the U.S. it means curcurbita pepo.  The most popular of this is a vine bearing orange fruits or pumpkin used as a piefilling.

Pumpkin is any several prickly vine with large lobed leaves and yellow flowers, in the genus cucurbita of the order violates.

Pumpkin is commonly applied to the large orange coloured fruit, the curcurbita species is used when ripe as a table vegetable in pies.  The flesh is some what coarse and strongly flavoured, hence generally not served as a baked vegetable.

Fluted pumpkin (Telfaria accidentalis) belongs to the family cucurbitaceae.  It is known as “Ugu” in Igbo, “Umee” in urchobo “Ubon” in Efik and “Iroko” in Yoruba language.  It is widely eaten in the first zone of the southern Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea.  Both mature and immature leaves and the young shoots are frequently eaten as a pot herb.

The seeds are cooked whole or ground up and used as soup thickener.  They have agreeable almond like flavour very nutritious and highly rich in oil of potential industrial value.   The seed also contains relatively high amount of minerals and vitamins required in human nutrition.

The amino acid of the protein are deficient in the sulphur containing amino acid.  (Asiegbu 1987).

The wide shortage of animal protein in developing countries had continued to attract research interest in plant protein of high abundance.

However the ultimate success of utilizing plant protein in food formulation depend largely upon it’s functional properties some of these functional some of these functional properties include water and oil absorption capacity, gelation property, Emulsification, protein solubility, bulk density (Fagbemi and Oshodi 1991).

Considerable work had been done on it’s cultivation and diseases (Maduewsi 1977).  Seed biological chemical ecology cultural practices and fatty acid composition of the oil in the seed.  Both the essential and non essential amino acid of fluted pumpkin is higher than that of colocyn this citrullus.

Fagbemi and Oshodi (1991) examined the chemical composition and functional properties of the defatted seed flour, it’s protein isolate nutritionally valuable minerals and compare with other oil seed flour, isolated being based in food formulation.  (Fagbemi and Osgodi 1991).  Previous studies on the functional properties of the fluted pumpkin had been done on the raw seed (dried sample. Fagbemi and Oshodi 1992, search on the forces affecting the thermal beheviour of protein, may provided methods of improving the functional behaviour of oil seed proteins in food system.      Heating to denature some protein had been reported to be justifiable or desirable in thermal destruction of functional agents and deteoretion of enzyme and in enhancing the digestibility of the component proteins in oil seed.

Processing effects on functional properties is desirable for designing appropriate refining, extraction and drying methods for the preparation of the functional properties.  There is need to study salt and processing effect on the functional properties of some vegetable protein to enhance their optimum utilization.

This present work is aimed at the following

1)        To study the effect of processing on the proximate composition of the fluted pumpkin seed flour.

2)        To study the effect of salt on protein solubility of the defatted fluted pumpkin seed flour.

3)        To investigate processing effect the foaming capacity and stability of defatted fluted pumpkin seed flour.

4)        Study the effect of pH and processing on the foaming capacity and stability of defatted seed flour.