1.0 INTRODUCTION
Legumes are low?priced sources of protein?rich foods that have been important in alleviating protein malnutrition and in the tropics; they are the next important food crop after cereals (Oyarekua, 2009). Leguminous seeds include soybean, cowpea, groundnut, pigeon pea (fio-fio), mucuna (velvet beans), jack bean, oil bean, and chicken pea. The legume and grain families are by far the world’s most important sources of food; grains supply starch, whereas legumes which include bean, peas, and alfalfa supply protein and fats. Legumes are rich sources of protein, energy, vitamins, dietary fibre, minerals, and oil, especially the oil?seeds (Arawande and Borokini, 2010). Cereals are deficient in lysine and tryptophan, but rich in methionine and cysteine, whereas legumes are deficient in sulfur?containing amino acids such as methionine and cysteine, and rich in lysine (Sodipo and Fashakin, 2011). There is a need to combine the cereals and legumes together so as to complement each other.
Pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan) is a locally available, affordable, and underutilized grain legume of the tropics and subtropics (Fasoyiro et al, 2010). Pigeon pea uses include soil improvement, agroforestry, intercropping, food, feed, wood, and pest management. Pigeon pea is reported to contain 20%–22% protein, 1%–2% fat, 65% carbohydrate, and 6.8% ash (Onweluzo and Nwabugwu, 2009) and rich in mineral quality and fibre content. It is known as “otili” in the South?western part of Nigeria. In South?eastern Nigeria, it is usually consumed in cooked form like cooked beans and most consumers prefer to cook “fio?fio”, as it is usually called, with firewood due to the long period of time it takes to soften. The presence of antinutrients in pigeon pea has limited its utilization. Fermentation process had also been utilized to increase the protein and textural qualities of the seeds (Fasoyiro et al., 2010).
Proximate analysis is a set of methods to get information about the nutritional value of food. They were developed around 1850 in Germany especially for animal feed (Adeyeye et al., 2015). It uses some chemical-physical properties of a special group of nutrients in their methods. The analysis contains: dry matter by drying at 103C; ash by incineration at 550C, crude protein by kjeldahl determination of nitrogen, crude fibre as the organic fraction remaining after acid and alkaline hydrolysis and crude fat as the fraction extracted with petroleum ether. Proximate Analysis involves the partitioning of compounds in a food into six categories based on the chemical properties of the compounds (Adeyeye et al., 2015). The six categories are: moisture, ash, crude protein (or Kjeldahl protein), crude lipid, crude fibre, nitrogen-free extracts (digestible carbohydrates).
1.1 AIM
The aim of this work is to determine the nutritional composition of pigeon pea.
1.2. OBJECTIVES
The Objectives of this research are: