Starch is a component of flour and is used as a thickening agent in cooking.
Starch is typically added to foods such as soups to make them thicker, but this can increase the calorie and carbohydrate content. Now, researchers have discovered that by arranging starch particles into special shapes, they can turn them into super-thickening agents while reducing the starch content in food without sacrificing texture. The research findings were recently published in Science Advances.
The thickening effect of starch particles is due to their expansion when heated. This means that the particles squeeze together, reducing the space for liquid components to flow freely. Researchers wondered if they could replicate this effect by hollowing out starch clusters to reduce the required amount of starch. "The problem is that you can't carve starch particles like you carve pumpkins," said one of the paper's authors, Peilong Li from Cornell University.
The researchers used starch particles extracted from amaranth seeds and combined them with water and oil to design a method for arranging them into three-dimensional shapes. The starch particles were arranged around oil droplets, and then the researchers used heating and freeze-drying to remove the two liquids. What remained were starch structures, some shaped like hollow cages and others like stacked sheets.
The researchers found that these starch structures worked very well as thickening agents while halving the amount of starch required for thickening food.
Fan Zhu from the University of Auckland in New Zealand said that using these particles as the basis for a new generation of hollow starch structures is highly innovative and can make starch an important component in future food design.
However, amaranth seed starch is expensive and difficult to obtain in large quantities, so applying this new method to cheaper and more abundant starches like corn starch holds more promise. "More research is needed to see what happens when you put these starch structures in your mouth," he said. Related paper information: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adi7069
