Savory cereal bars made with seed, fruit peel, and fish meal

Cereal bars are practical, popular, and represent a multicomponent food with market potential. This work aimed to develop tasty cereal bars with kabocha seeds (Cucurbita moschata), kabocha peels, pineapple peel (Ananas sp.), and passion fruit peel (Passiflora sp.) with different levels of fishmeal, as nutritional enrichment. To this purpose, the fish meal was prepared with tilapia and salmon carcasses added to the basic ingredients of the bar. The fish concentrate levels used were 0% (control), 5%, 10% and 15%, amounting to four treatments, with five replications. The elaborated bars were analyzed for proximate compositional, sensory properties, and microbiological contamination. The results indicated high levels of protein (49.65%) and lipid (32.40%) for fishmeal. The inclusion of this concentrate in cereal bars interfered with their composition by increasing protein content and reducing the content of carbohydrates and caloric value. As for sensory properties, the average scores were around 6, which indicates that the panelists slightly liked the product. It can be concluded that the addition of up to 15% of tilapia fishmeal with salmon in savory cereal bars containing seed and fruit peel, improve their nutritional composition without adversely affecting their sensory quality.