Injera is a dietary staple in Ethiopia, eaten with most meals. It is a flatbread made with teff flour. Injera is vulnerable to adulteration with cheaper gesso or cassava flours.
This paper (purchase required) reports a simple, affordable, portable, and easy-to-use method based on a paper analytical device to indicate adulteration qualitatively.
The authors report that the developed test card generated a red-orange colour on lane B (ferric detection), red on lane D (ferrous detection), Prussian blue on lane F (ferric detection), and Turnbull’s blue colour on lane H (ferrous detection) for pure teff injera. The colour barcodes generated by pure teff injera differ from those produced by teff injera that contain gesso or cassava.
In a survey of local market produce, the test card colour result was less intense or inactive in most cases. It indicates that inexpensive cereals might be used in place of authentic teff flour or flours have been blended before baking.
The authors cross-validated their method by analysing the elemental composition of samples using microwave plasma atomic emission spectrometers.
Photo by Syed F Hashemi on Unsplash
