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Definition of Extrusion Cooking Technology, the Food Industry in Focus: A Review
Abstract
The aim of this paper was to review the different definitions of extrusion cooking of food available in literature. Extrusion cooking of food entails different unit operations in a single process whereby different food ingredients are uniformly mixed and forcefully passed through a die. It has been used in producing various shapes and sizes of food products. Extrusion technology is mostly applied in the manufacture of snacks, breakfast cereals and ready-to-eat food products and the more modern 3D breakfast cereals and snacks. Extrusion cooking involves a high temperature short time process and is very useful in producing low-fat snacks. Extrusion cooking of food entails different unit operations in a single process. An extruder has five major components, pre-conditioner, barrel, screw, die (usually with cutter) and the feeding system. It originated in the metallurgical industry. Food extruder may be classified thermally, geometrically or conveying mechanism based on applications, design and configurations. Extruders have the same operating principles, basically, a screw extruder is made up of a rotating screw in a fixed barrel and a die at the exit. Different types ofextruders have advantages and limitations. Different researchers have used a variety of raw material for extrusion cooking ranging from flours of cassava, maize, wheat, corn, millet and soybean. Pasta and breakfast cereals are the commonest extruded cereal-based food products.
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Cereals, extruder, high temperature, mixing, shear, short-time, snacksArticle Metrics
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Copyright (c) 2025 Oluchukwu Nwadi, Thomas Okonkwo
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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Nwadi, O. M. M., & Okonkwo, T. (2025). Definition of Extrusion Cooking Technology, the Food Industry in Focus: A Review. Pakistan Journal of Nutrition, 24, 46–56. https://doi.org/10.3923/pjn.2025.46.56
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