New formulation to produce date powder

Several efforts have been made to found alternative uses of dates and especially low quality dates. However, very limited studies attempted to make powder out of date fruits that can be used as important ingredient in food processing like in bakery, ice cream and many other industries. Date powder is expected to offer many advantages over all the other suggested products, such as extended shelf life, concentrate the minerals and vitamins, ease of handling, improve digestibility and reduce weight. Unfortunately, all the attempts to produce the powder were not totally successful due to stickiness of the final product as a result of high sugar content and especially fructose sugar. All the previous reported work on date powder didn?t provide solution to the fundamental problem with date powder production which is caking due to presence of high content of sugar and especially fructose. Most of the work that was done so far involved using high percentage of fillers such as matodextran and/or arabic gum to minimize stickiness. The recommended percentage of fillers to give good free flowing properties ranged from 40-60% from the final product, such percentage makes the fillers an integral ingredient of the product not an additive, hence, the product should not be called pure date powder. On the other hand, many products are available in the market claim 100% pure date powder. The aim of this study is to produce stable date powder without adding any foreigner ingredient.