Chickpeas Research Paper

Chickpeas (also called garbanzo beans) are a type of legume that is used throughout forty-five different countries and is noted to be the third most popular vegetable in the world.1 Beans are a very important part of the legume family, in which they are classified as their own section of protein and calorie consumption for human nutrition. Chickpeas are not only a popular legume but also are full of protein, vitamins, energy, and minerals. These nutritional benefits have shown a diminishing effect of diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes. Legumes also have anti-nutrients, which include tannins, phytic acid, and trypsin inhibitors.2 A way to remove these anti-nutrients and incorporate these healthy legumes into the human diet, would be to cook and make them edible. Before the cooking process of the chickpeas can begin, they have to soak in an aqueous solution. The soaking process is critical to the taste of chickpeas, because soaking, “hastens the germination of starch in the seed.”1
The process of water absorption by a chickpea or any type of legume is best understood by explaining diffusion and osmosis. When a chickpea is placed in a water

solution, it has low initial moisture content, therefore it correlates to an area of low concentration. As diffusion is the net movement of molecules from an area to high concentration to an area of low concentration in exploration of equilibrium, osmosis takes place during the chickpea soaking process. Osmosis is similar to diffusion, in which water rushes through a semi-permeable membrane from a higher concentration to a lower concentration, in order to fill the chickpea with moisture and obtain equilibrium between the surroundings and the system.3
There are two models that can depict the amount of moisture absorption in chickpeas, which are normalized data and the Peleg equation.

Since, normalized data is the initial absorbance divided by the difference in the selected absorbance value from the initial, this model reduces and even eliminates data redundancy.4 Also, data normalization results in a positive correlated line with values increasing to a maximum value of one. Along with data normalization, another model that depicts the amount of moisture absorption is the Peleg equation. The Peleg equation relates the amount of moisture absorption to the k1 and k2 values that describe the rate of hydrolysis. The k1 value relates to the initial absorption rate, whereas the k2 value relates to the maximum attainable moisture

content.5
The legume absorption is becoming a growing field in science, in which other individuals have conducted research in this field of study. Sharanagat et al have experimented with the moisture content over a controlled time period with different solution temperatures in the surroundings of three bean varieties and three chickpea varieties.2 The field of legume absorption has branched out into the biological field, in which Nestares et al have tested the nutritional content of chickpeas in rats by placing the chickpeas under seven different methods of treatment.6 The purpose of this experiment is to determine the moisture content in chickpeas over a fixed time with three differently concentrated NaCl solutions. Two different modes of determining the moisture content will be used, including normalized data based on the mass of the chickpeas with a change in time and the Peleg equation.