Ogi, a popular fermented cereal-based foods consumed as weaning foods by infants and as dietary staples for adults in west Africa is usually processed by natural fermentation, which takes up to 48h to produce. This is the first report of producing the maize gruel (ogi) in less than 5h, by pre-treatment of the maize grains before fermentation. Pre-treatment involved particle size reduction of the maize grains, hydrolysis of starch (steeping of maize grains) and addition of fermentation starter, with short term low heat exposure (at 45o to 60oC; for one to 3h) to encourage the growth of fermenting microbes (1o fermentation). The desired product was obtained after blending, sieving and stabilizing the fermented maize gruel for 1 to 2h at ambient temperature (2o fermentation). For consumption, the gruel was stirred with an appropriate quantity of boiling water into a consistent gel paste, ogi. The microbial load of the different combinations of pre-treated maize gruels increased appreciably, as the inoculum size of the fermentation starter increased and fermentation progressed. The incidence of different strains of Lactobacillus fermentum was very prominent in all the samples. Other species of the genus Lactobacillus, such as L. plantarum and L. lactis were also isolated from the maize gruel samples, even after the pre-treatment of the maize grains.
