第十九届上海国际淀粉及淀粉衍生物展览会

淀粉通常被添加到汤等食物中，使其变得更浓稠，但这样做会增加卡路里和碳水化合物含量。
现在，美国康奈尔大学的研究人员发现，通过将淀粉颗粒排列成特殊形状，可以将它们变成超级增稠剂，同时在不牺牲口感的情况下减少食物中的淀粉含量。
2月16日，相关研究成果发表于《科学进展》。淀粉是面粉的一种成分，是烹饪中使用的增稠剂。淀粉颗粒使食物变稠是因为它们受热时会膨胀。这意味着颗粒会相互挤压，从而使液体成分自由流动的空间变小。研究人员想知道他们是否可以复制这种效果“问题在于不能像雕刻南瓜一样雕刻淀粉颗粒。”论文作者之一、康奈尔大学的李培龙说。

原文
We built superstructures using amaranth starch granules as building blocks via a Pickering emulsion approach (Fig. 2A). We first extracted amaranth starch from amaranth flour in such a way that we retained some native proteins. The small size (~1 μm), high protein content (2.4%), and tunable softness of this high-protein amaranth starch make it the best candidate for building fused superstructures using this approach, and was therefore used as our building block for the entire study (21). These high-protein starch granules, being moderately hydrophobic, will position themselves around an oil droplet at the oil/water (O/W) interface during emulsification via high-shear homogenization [Fig. 2A(2)] (21). If no heat treatment is conducted after emulsification, and we remove both the inner (oil) and outer (water) phases by freeze-drying, the adjacent starch granules that originally surrounded the oil droplet will peel off into 2D sheets [Fig. 2A(3a)], which can then be cross-linked to reinforce them [Fig. 2A(4a)]. The size of these sheets can be controlled; for example, by increasing the homogenization speed, smaller oil droplets are formed, which reduce the size of the sheets. Alternatively, if controlled heating is briefly applied after emulsification, but before freeze-drying, adjacent starch granules surrounding the oil droplet become fused together to form a strong hollow 3D cage after removal of both the inner and outer phases [Fig. 2A(3b)], which can then also be cross-linked [Fig. 2A(4b)]. We investigated these superstructures in terms of their morphology, spatial and structural (molecular) conformation, water-holding capacity (WHC), critical caking concentration (CCC), and viscosity, along with the effect of method parameters such as heating temperature and heating time on cage morphology and crystallinity.