Materials and methods
Plant material and extract preparation
Plants of B. officinalis L. were grown during autumn–spring in the experimental field of the Department of Agricultural and Forest Science, University of Palermo (38°9′28″N, 13°20′3″E). Plants were collected at flowering and leaves were immediately separated, cleaned, washed, comminuted and mixed. Leaf bulk was divided in two aliquots, one to be used fresh for traditional borage tagliatelle (TBT) and the other one to be subjected to the extraction of the aqueous fraction for innovative borage tagliatelle (IBT) production. The aqueous extract (AE) was prepared according to the method of García-Iñiguez de Ciriano et al. (2009). Water extraction was performed in triplicate. The extract was freeze-dried, previously freezing at −80 °C and used, after rehydration, with distilled water. After freeze-drying, the yield in powder was 2.60±0.08 g from 100 g of fresh leaves of borage.
Tagliatelle production