Modified Starches
In your opinion, what would be an ideal starch for all industrial uses including in food use? Well, one would think an ideal starch for most of the foods should be able to produce a smooth texture with a heavy bodied consistency but no gel phase, have a bland flavour, give a clean transparent solution and paste, retain its thickening power at high temperature, high shear and low temperature. Unfortunately, native starches cannot satisfy this wide range of desirable properties. The shortcomings encountered for different applications could be the lack of free flowing properties of water repellence of the starch granules, insolubility or failure of the granules to swell and develop viscosity after cooking, cohesive or rubbery texture of the cooked starch particularly of waxy corn, potato and tapioca starch, the sensitivity of the cooked starch to breakdown during extended cooking when exposed to shear or low pH, the lack of clarity and the tendency of starch sols from conventional cereal starches to become opaque and gel when cooled etc.
The native starches are, therefore, modified to overcome one or more of the above shortcomings thus expanding the usefulness of starch for myriad of industrial applications. Food starches, which have one or more of their original characteristics altered by treatment in accordance with good manufacturing practice, are therefore, referred to as modified starches.