Nutritional value of mixtures of baladi bread and broad beans

Several supplementation mixtures to the local Egyptian bread were designed and tested for their p.e.r. and n.p.u. values using weanling rats. In the first experiment, broad beans (var. baladi) were subjected to five different methods of preparation and each of the products was added to bread‐based diets at 50 : 50 nitrogen ratio. When the p.e.r. (1.78) and n.p.u. (53) values of the raw beans were set as 100 and 100, the respective following values are obtained: 94, 98 for soaked; 94, 87 for germinated followed by boiling and 59, 79 for autoclaved beans (1 h). In the second experiment 11 different protein mixtures were tested for their p.e.r. values. The tested protein mixture with the lowest p.e.r. value is that from bread + 0.5% DL‐Met (p.e.r. = 1.3). The most favourable mixture found is bread + Met + Lys + Thr (p.e.r. = 3.3) to bring it to level furnished by whole egg, followed by the mixtures bread N and raw broad bean N 40:60 (p.e.r. = 3.0); bread N and stewed broad bean N 70:30 (p.e.r. = 2.8). Upon supplementation with 0.5% DL‐Met mean p.e.r. values of 3.0 and 2.7 were obtained for raw and stewed broad beans diets, respectively. The amino acid analyses showed losses of 10 and 35% in the lysine and S‐containing amino acids, respectively, after autoclaving the beans for 1 h.