Authors: Joanna Blythman
There are many types of modified starch, each with unique properties and functions, a case of horses for courses. The starch in canned soups, for example, is often bonded with phosphates, which allows it to absorb more water yet stop any separation in the liquid. To prevent tomato sauce spilling off a factory pizza during baking, a modified starch treated with a chlorine solution is often added to the topping.
In Europe, modified starches are considered as food additives, and must carry an E number. These days, because the prefix ‘modified’ tends to ring the wrong bell with consumers, starch companies are developing a new tier of more functional ‘clean label’ starches that can lose the label-polluting M-word and E number, and be replaced with more consumer-friendly ‘soluble fibre’, ‘starch’ or ‘dextrin’ tags.
These new wave starches are presented as more natural because they have not been chemically altered. Instead, only physical and mechanical techniques such as heat, extrusion, drum drying, compression and atomisation can be used to change the particle size and structure. Because these newer functional starches are branded and trademarked, the companies that produce them need only volunteer minimal information about how they are made because the method becomes their intellectual property (trade secret). Marketed as speciality starches targeted for specific uses, they have really caught on with manufacturers. As one academic explains, ‘specialty starches continue to outpace unmodified starches in the processed food industry because of their ruggedness and ability to withstand severe process conditions’.
It’s easy to see why food manufacturers take such a keen interest in starch, both old-timer and new guard. Whether it comes from corn, wheat, cassava, peas or potato, starch is wonderfully cheap and abundant because it is made from commodity cereals and cash crops that are much less expensive than other categories of food. Therein lies the appeal of starch. It provides a reliable, inexpensive bulk to pad out pricier ingredients, which makes for cost-effective ingredient replacement, as this starch company tells food manufacturers:
Like you, we’re committed to keeping costs low. Our business is built on successfully replacing expensive ingredients with more cost-effective alternatives, helping you withstand price fluctuations. Whether replicating expensive texture systems or substituting costly proteins, our starches will meet all your expectations and reduce your ingredient costs. So what’s the secret of creating foods that appeal to customers’ concerns about cost and quality? Take a fresh look at your recipes and replace expensive ingredients with no-compromise alternatives to reduce cost, not consumer appeal. We can provide you with the tools to replicate the eating enjoyment and texture consumers look for at a fraction of the cost.
The most charitable interpretation one can put on food manufacturers’ use of economical starch is that they deploy it in the best interests of the consumer, to give us what we want, at a price we can afford. With the aid of starch, manufacturers can use ‘cost optimisation’ to ‘value engineer’ their product for the benefit of price-sensitive shoppers. A worthwhile mission, surely?
Yet when you read the sales literature for starch products, a strong sense of self-interest on the part of food manufacturers emerges. Here, for instance, is how one starch company sells its starch-based fat replacer:
[It] cleverly allows food manufacturers to remove some butter content from products and still use the label ‘all butter’, which highlights to consumers that the food is still a decadent product. The finish of the product would retain the same ‘shortness’ and buttery richness and mouth-feel as the full fat equivalent.
Hey presto, the addition of starch allows opulently labelled ‘all butter’ biscuits or croissants to contain less butter than they did before. Not quite what your average person might deduce from the label. The fat-replacing starch being recommended here goes by the name of Delyte, presumably a play on delight/delicious and lite/light (low fat). Or possibly the person who thought it up was thinking of delete, meaning something taken away; in this case, butter.
In food manufacturing, starch often forms the basis of a product. ‘Your base starch serves as a viscosifier, which establishes your food’s structure’, one company explains. An example here might be a Catalan-style flan or French crème caramel, where starch replaces more expensive eggs, milk and cream. ‘Once you’ve created the structure with your base starch, co-texturisers [another set of starches] fine-tune texture properties. They bring out the more subtle differences in texture that we experience in our mouths while eating, such as mouthcoating [creamy] and meltaway [lusciousness].’
As well as offering cheap bulk and texturising potential, starch has never been in such demand as it currently is to replace other nutrients. As health regulators have breathed ever so lightly down the neck of the processed food industry to make its products healthier, reduction of fat, sugar and salt has become a regulatory religion, one that opens new doors for starch. Products can be reformulated, bumping up quantities of starch and cutting the persona non grata ingredients, thus providing a justification for reduced fat and sugar claims on the label. Using starch, manufacturers can adjust the composition or ‘matrix’ of a whole host of processed foods, to recast them in a flattering nutritional light. Doing so ticks a few boxes with the public health establishment, and the sums also add up very nicely for manufacturers, as this starch company explains:
Our specialty solutions mimic the organoleptic qualities of fat, delivering a creamy, luxurious texture and smooth, glossy appearance in better-for-you applications. We’re also skilled at replacing costly tomato solids. Whether you are looking to replace oil, cream, milk solids, vegetables or egg, we can ensure premium quality and guilt-free indulgence at a competitive price.
And when it comes to starch, ingredient savings are no idle promise. A high-performance starch can replace fat at a ratio of 10:1 in dips, dressings, soups and mayonnaise for a lower calorie, lower fat label at a lower cost. Starch can stand in for 30% of the cream in a ready meal spaghetti carbonara and make redundant at least 25% of the tomato paste otherwise needed to make a credible pasta sauce. It allows manufacturers to reduce the margarine in puff pastry by a fifth. A starch developed using a ‘cling optimised texture system’ will even have the necessary adhesion, viscosity and suspension to replace ‘up to 40% of tomato/vegetable solids in soups and sauces’.
On a factory scale, using starch makes for massive savings. As one food industry commentator observed, ‘Food technologists are a creative, but miserly, crowd. They strive to deliver consumer-pleasing products while piecing together penny-saving formulas’. Unlike home cooks, food technologists think in terms not of ingredients, but ‘ingredient systems’. For instance, rather than using an egg, they can come up with a configuration of ingredients and additives, which in totality will provide an egg-like effect. And in this endeavour, starch is a near-indispensable tool.
Of course, mimicry lies at the heart of modern food manufacture, a constant itch to make not a faithful version of the real thing, but something that passes for it. For food technologists and new product developers, all the fun with food comes when you take it apart, break it down into components, then reassemble it in a more lucrative, easy-to-process form.
Greek yogurt is a case in point. It is the most copied food of recent times, not least because its desirable ‘spoonability’ is pushing phenomenal market growth: sales grew by an impressive 67 per cent between 2008 and 2012. The spectacular sales curve of thick, rich Greek yogurt is symptomatic of growing disenchantment with dismal low-fat yogurts, a reaction to the sensory gap created by the removal of fat, the fraction of milk that naturally contains most of its taste and gives it a mouth-filling creaminess.
Sensing an opportunity, many companies want to get in on the dynamic Greek yogurt sector. As the spokesman for one dairy company notes: ‘Greek and Greek-style yoghurts often command a significant price premium in store, and offer food manufacturers an excellent opportunity to increase their margins’. But they face a stumbling block. When produced in the traditional way, Greek yogurt takes a whole lot more milk to make than standard yogurt, which puts up ingredient costs. Using an authentic Greek method, you need 100 kg of milk to end up with just 40 kg of finished yogurt. You’ll also require special separation equipment, and all that heroic Hellenic straining takes time. Who can be fagged? So the food industry has developed ‘quick process’ Greek-style yogurt that yields 100 kg of yogurt for 100 kg of milk, without having to buy equipment, or radically change factory set-up, by adding milk protein concentrate and starch. The resulting product is not authentic Greek yogurt as the Greeks understand it, but it will pass muster with many consumers, and the telling word ‘style’ will mainly go unremarked.
One market leading starch company, Ingredion, explains how it brought starch to the Greek yogurt arena:
The company employed its trained expert descriptive sensory panel to evaluate nine Greek-style yogurt samples on the market, all vanilla flavored, most strained, but some formulated, and characterised each one by 14 different textural attributes.
The company first mapped the sensory attributes of Greek yogurts on the market: qualities such as ‘jiggle’ (how firmly the yogurt moves on the spoon), ‘slipperiness’ (how easily it slides over the tongue), and surface shine. It then devised an innovative starch, which it claims can give ‘a similar texture and eating experience to the market leading product’, yet is cheaper to produce because it uses less milk and can be made using the standard high temperature/short time non-Greek method, without any investment in new equipment. With this fabulously functional starch, Ingredion promises that yogurt manufacturers ‘can get to market faster, and produce product at a lower overall cost’.
How does fast-track Greek-ish yogurt compare in taste to the genuine article? Because most such products are sold not as natural, plain yogurt, but with added flavours and sweeteners, we rarely have the opportunity to compare like for like. However, it is common knowledge in the processed food industry that starch can import unwelcome flavours. As one authority notes: ‘Cereal-based starches such as corn and wheat starch are sometimes considered to have off-notes described as ‘cardboard’ or ‘cereal-like’. Fortunately for manufacturers, because most processed foods are multiple ingredient formulations, they can make sure that off-tastes are routinely drowned out by other attention-grabbing flavours.
One thing is certain: the addition of starch reduces flavour in food. This is not just because it is used as a substitute for flavourful ingredients – eggs, meat, cheese, butter and so on – either. The hard fact is that starch brings absolutely nothing desirable to the table except texture, so eating food bulked up with added starch is the taste equivalent of listening to a symphony orchestra through a heavy fire door. Flavours become indistinct and ghost-like, a very faint memory of themselves, because they are eked out in a medium of all-embracing nonentity. Starches provide an architecture for processed food, just as they help construct paper, glue and industrial lubricants – and we don’t expect to eat those. One company sums up the whole purpose of modified starches:
They are used as bland-tasting functional ingredients in the food industry as fillers, stabilisers, thickeners, pastes, and glues in dry soup mixes, infant foods, sauces, gravy mixes, etc.
You can almost sense the lack of inspiration of the person who wrote that description, struggling to find something positive to say about such a tedious ingredient.
Even the companies that make starches don’t attempt to sell their organoleptic qualities. To do so would be a waste of time, because all food manufacturers understand that they taste, at best, of zilch. Instead, they try to make a virtue out of nothingness. ‘The bland taste of potato starches allows whole meat products to maintain their natural palatability’ is how one starch company puts it. A more forthright version of the same message might read ‘the boringness of starch won’t interfere with other ingredients’, and a postscript might add ‘but they will most certainly pad them out.’
And if the addition of starch means a net loss in flavour, it almost always translates into a net loss of nutrition also, because when highly refined starches of the type used in food manufacture replace proteins, fats, and fruits and vegetables, they actually worsen the nutritional profile of the resulting products. More starch in a recipe means less of some other ingredient, and in most cases, that other ingredient was a damn sight more nutritious.
Now this might sound counterintuitive if you have paid attention to the standard government nutrition advice: ‘Rather than avoiding starchy foods, it’s better to try and base your meals on them, so they make up about a third of your diet.’ In recent times, starchy foods, even the most refined types, have been hyped by public health agencies. Starchy foods, such as cereals, pasta and bread, we are told, ‘are a good source of energy and the main source of a range of nutrients in our diet. As well as starch, they contain fibre, calcium, iron and B vitamins’. This presentation of starchy carbohydrate as a hero nutrient is highly debatable. If we are going to champion certain foods on the basis of micronutrients, such as iron and B vitamins, then meat would be a better bet because it contains them in greater abundance. As for fibre, we can get all we need from vegetables and fruit.
Of course, starchy carbs in their whole, unprocessed forms do contain some useful micronutrients, but the same cannot be said for the refined sort, which would be more accurately described as stodge, or fodder. Refined starches are rapidly broken down into simple sugars and readily absorbed into the bloodstream. This is why, if you chew a bit of white bread for a few seconds longer than usual, it will begin to taste sweet. Refined carbohydrates cause spikes in our blood sugar and insulin levels, which encourages our bodies to produce and store fat. Long term, this predisposes us to chronic disease. Due to their smaller particle size, highly processed, chemically or physically altered starches – precisely the type used in food processing – cause an even faster rise in blood sugar. So when food manufacturers brag about reducing sugar – on the surface, a noble mission – it is worthwhile noting that if starch is the replacement, then this is a case of more of the same. Think of it as a gesture, a tactical, piecemeal reformulation that should not be mistaken for a radical one.