Application in Vermicelli Production

The most common application of sweet potato starch is the production of vermicelli. Although the applicability of sweet potato starch in vermicelli production is not as good as that of mung bean starch, there is still a strong interest in the study of sweet potato starch in vermicelli production due to its low cost of production and ease of production.

Tan Hongzhuo et al. investigated the commonalities and differences in the rheological behavior of sweet potato starch paste and mung bean starch paste, and the results showed that it is feasible to replace mung bean starch with sweet potato starch in vermicelli production.

Tan et al. found that the vermicelli processed with sweet potato starch had better quality, but compared with the vermicelli processed with mung bean starch, it had poorer quality in terms of apparent structure, internal crystal structure, and adhesive properties.

The study showed that the particle size of sweet potato starch was highly correlated with the quality of sweet potato vermicelli, and sweet potato starch with small particle size was more capable of producing good quality vermicelli. Tan Hongzhuo et al. found that artemisinin gum, konjac gum and xanthan gum and other food additives can improve the quality of sweet potato vermicelli, in addition to the discovery of konjac gum and artemisinin gum according to the ratio of 0.95:0.05 compound, the total amount of sweet potato starch added for the amount of 1%, the sweet potato vermicelli can make the quality of the vermicelli is close to the quality of pure mung bean vermicelli.

Degradation and application

In addition to being used in the production of vermicelli, sweet potato starch can be degraded into a variety of industrial raw materials after being treated by certain physical, chemical or biological methods, and is widely used in sugar production, fermentation, medicine and other industries.

Research found that amylase or alginate synthetase on sweet potato starch can produce maltose or alginate with appropriate treatment.

The fermentation of sweet potato starch by root molds can produce lactic acid; the fermentation of sweet potato starch by motile fermentation monospora can produce alcohol.

In addition, the application of sweet potato starch in medicine is also more extensive, such as dextrin glucosyltransferase treatment of sweet potato starch can produce cyclodextrins widely used in medicine; sweet potato starch can be processed into tablet adhesive after a certain treatment; sweet potato starch microparticles with a particle size of 10.3-13.1 μm can be used as a drug carrier.

Modification and application
Because the application of natural sweet potato starch has certain limitations, the modification technology of sweet potato starch has been widely studied. Modified sweet potato starch refers to the derivatives of sweet potato starch prepared by changing the natural properties of sweet potato starch or introducing new properties using physical, chemical or enzymatic methods, among which chemical modification is the most commonly used method.

After modification, the original characteristics of sweet potato starch have been targeted to improve, so that it can be directly to food thickeners, stabilizers, gelling agents or tissue enhancers, etc. widely used in food and other industries.

Such as pre-gelatinized sweet potato starch with its cold water solubility can be applied to the processing of convenience foods or used as surface coatings; sweet potato starch and phosphate monoester combination can increase the freezing and melting stability of sweet potato starch, thus expanding its application in frozen food, baby food.
In addition, sweet potato starch has been studied in other applications, such as in the processing of thermoplastics and edible films.