Noodles are one of the most important staple foods of the Orientals, and they are eaten in a variety of ways, with boiled noodles, fried noodles, mixed noodles, and steamed noodles each with their own flavors.
Some consumers have found that the noodles bought in supermarkets or farmers' markets are particularly tendonous, even if they are cooked for a long time, they will not rot, why is this?
Someone washed the noodles with water, and at the end of the washing, all that was left was a lump of sticky glue!
It is rumored that these noodles are added with plasticizer or some kind of glue, and people will get sick if they eat too much!
【Secret of The Tendon Road】
The secret of the noodle path lies in gluten, which is the protein in flour.
If you scrub the dough and noodles in water repeatedly, the sticky thing that remains is it.
There are two main types of gluten protein, namely wheat glysin and wheat gluten.
They can be combined with each other to form complex network structures.
You can think of noodles as sponges made of protein molecules, and starch granules and lipids are like the moisture in a sponge.
Protein is the backbone of the noodles, and subtle differences in their content and structure give the flour different processing properties.
About 40% of the wheat in the world is made into noodles, but they are completely different from cakes and bread.
If the protein content is too low, the toughness and elasticity of the noodles are insufficient, it is easy to break when processing, and it is easy to mix soup when cooking.
If there is too much protein and the noodles are too tough, although they are resistant to cooking, they are not easy to cook thoroughly, resulting in a poor final taste.
【How to increase strength】
To add some ingredients to the noodles, add some ingredients to it, such as gluten flour, eggs, salt or alkali.
Of course, gluten flour is best understood, and the reason why the noodles are not strong enough is because the gluten ingredient is not enough.
The effect of adding eggs is similar, because the protein of eggs has similarities in structure to gluten proteins, so the strength of the protein network structure can be enhanced.
You can use this trick at home with your own noodles, but noodle factories generally use pre-processed egg flour.
There is a saying in pasta that "salt is tendon, alkali is bone".
The main role of salt is to affect the spatial structure of gluten proteins, so that the network structure they form is more tight, so that the toughness of the noodles becomes stronger.
Alkali acts similarly to salts, and it promotes gluten proteins to bind to each other and increase structural strength.
However, alkali will make the noodles yellow, and the color of Sichuan cool noodles and Wuhan hot dry noodles comes from here.
【Plasticizer or glue】
Rumors of noodles plus plasticizers may be misinformed, but gluing is quite common.
This glue is not glue or industrial glue, but edible glue, scientific name thickener, if expressed in tall is soluble dietary fiber.
At present, there are dozens of thickeners allowed by the state, a considerable part of which are extracted from natural foods, such as pectin extracted from the peel, alginic acid and carrageenan extracted from seaweed, in addition to artemisia gum, field elite gum, flaxseed gum extracted from plants.
There are also some that are obtained by microbial fermentation of starch, such as cyclodextrin, kederan gum, xanthan gum and so on.
Take the most commonly used xanthan gum as an example, it is a polymer polysaccharide, it is covered with hydroxyl, carboxyl, amino and other structures, they are like "tentacles" can grasp proteins, starch and lipids, improve the toughness of noodles.
At the same time, it has high viscosity, good solubility, and can absorb a lot of water, so the taste of noodles is more elastic and smoother.
Another great use of thickeners is to make multigrain noodles.
Buckwheat, oats, and corn flour are not easy to form gluten structures, so wheat flour needs to be added to make elastic, stretch-resistant noodles.
If you want to add less wheat flour, you need to add a small amount of thickener to help.
Of course, there are alternatives without thickeners, such as adding konjac powder. The main ingredient of konjac is also a polymer polysaccharide, which can play the same role as a thickener.
In short, smooth and delicious noodles that have not been cooked for a long time do need to be technically processed, but it is not a black technology that is not unseemly.
Thickeners are used in food, and noodles are just one of its many shows.