Development of cake mix with reduced fat and high practicality by adding chia mucilage

Abstract The busy modern lifestyle, marked by the scarcity of time for food preparation, makes the industry focus on the production of fast-prepared, more practical, and better nutritional value foods. In this sense, one of the products that is highly used is pre-ready cake mixes, which during its preparation still needs the addition of other ingredients. Therefore, combining the practicality of preparation and better nutritional characteristics, this study aimed to develop a ready-made cake mix using dry chia mucilage as a fat substitute and requiring only the addition of water in its preparation. The ready-made mix was developed with wheat flour, sugar, powder milk, dehydrated whole egg, baking powder, and dry chia mucilage. Besides, these formulations were compared with a commercial cake mix through proximal composition and technological and physical characteristics. The ready-made cake mix developed with chia mucilage was easier and faster to prepare than the other formulations, due not the necessary addition of others ingredients. The formulations of the new mix had a lower lipid content than the commercial one, with emphasis on the pre-ready mix added with chia mucilage which showed a 60.4% reduction in the lipid content about the same pre-ready mix but added with margarine. Besides, this formulation showed cakes with higher protein content, and higher carbohydrate content since chia mucilage is mainly composed of fibers. Although the ready-made cake mix new was firmer than the others, the total score was acceptable. In this way, the cake mix was produced with better nutritional properties and easy preparation.