Abstract:Introduction: The food industry deals with highly sensitive products. This being the primary reason, maintaining quality standards and adhering to quality requirements are imperative for players in the food industry. It has been a proven fact that food served at restaurants is generally high in calories, fats and carbohydrates thereby leading to malnutrition and other health related disorders like overweight, obesity, heart diseases etc. on prolonged regular consumption. This food however generally lacks in certain essential nutrients like proteins, vitamins and minerals thus causing greater imbalance.
Objectives: The study was carried out with the following objectives:
• To calculate the proximate composition of karahi paneer served at selected restaurants
• To evaluate the nutritional adequacy of karahi paneer served thereto
Methodology: The karahi paneer samples were procured from private, public and fast food restaurants in a sterile ice box. Development of the standardized recipe and proximate composition analysis were performed to evaluate energy, carbohydrate, protein, fats, fibre, ash and moisture content. The proximate values were calculated in triplicate. The mean scores of the triplicates and standard deviation were calculated using SPSS 16.0 version.
Results and Conclusion: Karahi paneer served in most of the studied restaurants was found to be deficient in calories and proteins with reference to the standardized recipe. The karahi paneer of private restaurants (R1) was higher in carbohydrate (56 per cent) and fat (5 per cent) content whereas that served in public (R2) as well as fast food restaurants (R3) ranked higher in fat (4 percent and 13 per cent respectively) and fibre (1 per cent and 6 per cent respectively) content only. However, a high downfall in fibre content (20 per cent) has been observed in case of private restaurants.