What Are the Applications of Gluten Powder?
Mar 31, 2022
Gluten powder (wheat gluten protein) is a natural vegetable protein obtained from wheat, corn and other cereals by scientific processing, with crude protein content above 75%, consisting of wheat alcoholic protein and wheat gluten protein in a ratio of about 1:1.
Gluten has a variety of physical properties such as strong water absorption, viscoelasticity, film forming, adhesion thermal coagulation, fat absorption emulsification, etc. It is also rich in functional amino acids such as glutamine. Currently, glutamine is widely used in food processing industry and animal nutrition and feed industry to improve the taste and nutritional properties of food and enhance the nutritional value of feed, which has good application prospects.
The total annual production of wheat in China is over 100 million tons, and there are sufficient raw materials for gluten processing, so it has obvious processing and application advantages. According to statistics, the global annual production of gluten is about 600,000 tons, and China is about 100,000 tons.
The application of gluten in the food field
1. Bread, cake and other new type of flour food
With the increase of people's health care consciousness, consumers' demand for coarse grains has increased, causing the innovation of formulations and processing technology in the pastry industry, and the variety of pastry products has become more and more abundant.
Usually, bread flour contains less wheat protein and has weaker gluten, so adding coarse grains to bread flour will reduce the dough formation, which in turn will reduce the flexibility, elasticity and color of the dough products and cannot meet the demand of food baking processing.
Gluten has good water-holding and viscoelasticity, which can keep the moisture inside the bread, delay the aging and tastiness of the bread, make the bread uniform in texture, moderate in elasticity and better in taste, and enhance the nutritional balance of the pastry products and enhance the consumer's choice.
2. Dumplings, noodles and other traditional noodle products
In the northern region of China, noodles and dumplings occupy a large proportion of the staple food structure. The addition of gluten to noodle products can improve the palatability, stickiness, smoothness and other indicators of noodle products.
Many studies have shown that the addition of gluten can increase the protein content of noodles, increase the hardness, viscoelasticity, recovery, and maximum shear of noodles, and promote the formation of gluten network structure. In addition, the addition of gluten in the dough can also change the rheological properties of the flour, to reduce the dough stabilization time, reduce the degree of weakness, and improve the overall index effect.
3. Gluten can be used as a high-quality vegetarian ingredient to replace meat products.
Research shows that gluten can be processed into pellets to replace the frozen state of minced meat Yuan or processed into paste or fibrous protein products as a substitute for minced meat fillings. However, during the processing of livestock and poultry meat products, special attention should be paid to the sterilization temperature of 70~75℃ for livestock and poultry meat, which has a certain gap with the thermal coagulation temperature of 80℃ for gluten powder, so the gluten powder used as a binder should be modified first.
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