Introduction

Winged bean (Psophocarpus tetragonolobus) is one of the versatile edible

legumes of tropical origin. The plant is a climber in the fabaceae family, and closely
related to the pole beans. It is a twining annual vine that grows with trellis support to
about 5 meters in height. It is also recognized by alternative names such as asparagus
bean for their delicate asparagus-like flavor of young, immature pods. It grows best
under hot, humid tropical belt supplanted with short day light, good moisture and welldrained sandy, loam soil. After about 45 days of planting, it bears white, pink or lightblue flowers which appear in spikes. Wing shaped, elongated pods appear soon about 60
days after plantation. The pods feature along its entire length frilly edges on its four sides
and round to oval shaped beans inside.
Winged beans can be available in the markets almost all round the year in tropical
regions. The beans generally known by their regional names such as kacong botol in
Malaysia and kecipirin Indonesia.Other names by which these frilly edged beans
addressed around the world are asasparagus pea, princess pea, four-angled bean, goa
bean. In the Philippines, winged bean is known as sigarilyas which is commonly seen in
the backyard vegetable garden in rural areas.
Winged bean hold huge potential role as an all-round nutritional solution to
alleviate malnutrition problems.Its various parts are rich sources of the protein, vitamins,
minerals and calories so often in short supply in tropical countries. It is an especially
good source of vitamin A, deficiencies of which cause blindness in many children in
tropical countries. The winged bean seed rivals the soybean in quantity and quality of its

protein. Mature seeds contain 29 to 37% proteins and 15 to 18% oil. It has fairly good
amounts of phosphorus, iron, and vitamin B. Essential amino acid composition of
winged bean is very similar to that of soybean. The fatty acid composition is very much
comparable to groundnut.
Because of its relatively high content of protein and soybean like quality and
quantity, this legume can be an answer to the prevalent protein calorie malnutrition in
many developing countries. By making flour from its beans and producing bread,this
can substitute to the unconventional protein sources and meet the demand of the of
protein supply by the growing population.

Fig 1. Flow chart for the production of the Winged Bean flour.

Materials and methods

Source of materials
Randomly selected matured winged bean used for the experimentation were
randomly harvested from the outlying winged bean farms at Talisay City, Negros
Occidental, Philippines. The sugar (Dangote brand), salt (Dangote brand), margarine
(Blue Band) and dried yeast (Angel brand) used for bread making were purchased at the
Metro Super Market, Talisay City, Philippines.

Production of winged bean flour

The unit and sub-unit operations used in the production of the experimental lesser
yam flour are shown in Figure 1. The farmstead operations which included de- hydration
of matured winged bean in an oven (oven BS, Gallenkamp, England), milling (with
Thomas milling machine, Arthur H. Thomas Co. Philadelphia, PA, USA) and
sieving, produced a floury material of such fineness that all the aggregates passed
through a 250 micron sieve. The produced flour was stored in sealed poly- ethylene bags
until used for bread making (within one week).

Bread making
The experimental bread samples were made with the ingredients in Table 1 using
the modified method of Onabolu et al (2003) as shown in Fig 2. The unit and subunit
operations in the bread production (using adoptable farmstead level technology) included
dough mixing (manual), fermentation, proofing (at 35oC, with heat from the sun) and
mechanical baking (Ignis oven), with cooling (at ambient room temperature) for 1hour as
the last step before the relevant bread evaluations.