Recent advances in application of modified starches for breadmaking

Modified starches have been investigated and developed for more than a century and have various applications in food, paper and textile industries. Recently, chemically modified starches such as esterified, etherified and/or cross-linked starches have been widely used for various prepared foods such as snack foods, breads and cakes to improve their quality. In breadmaking, starch is a major component and plays an important role in texture and quality of dough and bread. Therefore, modified starches, which were developed to decrease undesirable properties of native starches, also affect the properties of dough and quality of bread. The modified starches could be used to substitute up to 20% for wheat flour without deterioration of bread quality. However, vital gluten is also needed to blend with the substituted modified starches to improve loaf volume of bread. Generally, the substituted flours gelatinized more quickly and had higher peak viscosity than the wheat flour alone. The dough made from the substituted flours exhibit weaker and less stability than that made from the wheat flour. The breads substituted with hydroxypropylated starch were less firm and retained softness during storage longer than those with other modified starches or wheat flour alone. The acetylated starch also improved the firmness of bread crumb during storage, whereas cross-linked starches made the bread crumb harder because the chemical cross-linking retained the granular structure of starch in the gluten network resulting in increase in the firmness of bread crumb. However, cross-linked waxy starches retarded the firmness of bread crumb despite its high degree of cross-linking. Thus, the different kinds of chemically modified starches played the different roles in the texture and quality of doughs and breads. We propose that a suitable amount of modified starches should be useful for breadmaking to improve the functionality and quality of breads.