What are the nine starch properties?

Starch is a storage polysaccharide stored in cells as starch granules during plant growth. It is particularly abundant in seeds, tubers, grains, and roots. Cooking starch, mainly mung bean starch, tapioca starch, pea starch, corn starch, sweet potato starch, potato starch, wheat starch, lozenge starch, lotus root starch and so on.
Potato starch: such as sweet potato starch, potato starch, tapioca starch, sweet potato starch and so on. Legume starch: such as mung bean starch, pea starch and so on. Cereal starch: such as wheat starch, corn starch and so on. Other starches: such as kudzu starch, lozenge starch, lotus root starch, etc.
The role of starch in food processing is mostly realized through pasting. Although the role of different varieties of starch is almost the same, they have great differences in color, taste, viscosity and water absorption. So, what are their differences and personalities?
Corn Starch
Characteristics: Highly hygroscopic, suitable for battering and sizing
Application: Corn starch is the most widely used starch in cooking. Corn starch has a crispy texture after deep-frying, so deep-fried dishes that need a crispy skin usually need to add corn starch to the batter. In the slippery stir-fry, slippery buttery, vinegar buttery, boil, explosion and other cooking methods, chicken, duck, goose tender parts, pork, beef, mutton, as well as fish, shrimp, crabs and other seafood, seafood are suitable for corn starch to batter, cooking out of the food is very smooth and tasty. Generally speaking, corn starch is also chosen for thickening dishes.
Tapioca Starch
Characteristics: Good elasticity, suitable for making pudding and desserts.
Application: Tapioca starch is a powder made from tapioca after starch extraction and dehydration. Tapioca starch color white, after adding water and heat cooking, was transparent, there is no taste, and taste with QQ elasticity, generally used in the production of desserts, such as cake pudding, taro rounds, etc., sago dew in the sago is also processed and made from it. Northeastern people like to eat the pulled pork, is also made of tapioca starch.
Pea starch
Personality: Crispy texture, suitable for crispy meat or braised vegetables, can also be made into cold noodles
Application: Pea starch is a better starch. When frying crispy meat, use pea starch to shoot powder or slurry is better, the finished product is soft and hard moderately, the texture is very crispy, but it is not like corn starch so crispy and hard. Moreover, if you use pea starch to make crispy pork soup or risotto, the crispy skin of the ingredients will not come off. However, the best use of pea starch should be to make cold noodles or cold skin.
Sweet potato starch
Characteristics: Strong water-absorbing ability, suitable for basting meat, but also for making dim sum, vermicelli and vermicelli.
Application: Compared with other starches, sweet potato starch has a darker color and rougher granules, and the texture will be more sticky after pasting, so you basically won’t use it for thickening. When it comes to the use of sweet potato starch, we can summarize it into four categories: first, it is used to process sweet potato vermicelli (such as the production of hot and sour noodles) or sweet potato vermicelli, vermicelli; secondly, it can be used for meat raw materials, such as slices of pork, fish slices and other sizing.
The color of the raw material after sizing is not as white as other starches, but after blanching, the taste is very smooth and tender, and there is a good transparency; thirdly, it can be used to make knocked shrimp or knocked meat (for example, the famous Fujian snack-meat bird’s-eye, which must be made by using sweet potato starch); fourthly, it can be used as a dry powder, for example, after marinating pork slices or strips, it can be coated with sweet potato starch, and then coated with sweet potato starch. Wrapped in sweet potato starch deep-fried, deep-fried crispy pork is a little black, the skin is not crisp enough, but used to make a casserole, long cooking does not rot, the skin tough, chewy, especially tasty.
Mung Bean Starch
Characteristics: small water absorption, suitable for making vermicelli and vermicelli.
Application: Mung bean starch is made from mung beans by soaking them in water and grinding them up, then precipitating them. It is characterized by sufficient viscosity, small water absorption, and white and glossy color. Mung bean starch contains more straight-chain starch and less branched-chain starch, and it is more expensive, so it is less used in the kitchen (pasteurization occurs mainly by branched-chain starch). However, the Longkou Vermicelli made from mung bean starch is almost the best vermicelli (some will also add some pea starch), and it is so thin that it is not easy to break, and the texture is still very sinewy, which is hard to do with other starches.
Potato starch
Personality: sticky enough, suitable for cured meat, thickening
Application: Potato starch is also the most used starch in the kitchen. It is made by grating potatoes and then scrubbing and settling them. It is characterized by sufficient viscosity, fine texture, white color, and better luster than mung bean starch, but poor water absorption. Due to the low pasting temperature, it can reduce the loss of nutrition and flavor caused by high temperature, and it can be used for thickening to ensure the original flavor of ingredients to the maximum extent.
Potato starch can also be made into potato flour, very smooth, shabu-shabu hot pot, make casserole are very good, but sizing, thickening is not as good as the fineness of corn starch, and is prone to aging reaction, reducing the taste of dishes, so not much used in the cooking process.
Wheat starch
Personality: white color, good transparency, suitable for making shrimp glue
Application: Wheat starch is precipitated or made from flour after the gluten is washed out of the dough. Characterized by white color, but less glossy, the quality is not as good as potato starch, and it is easy to precipitate after thickening. Wheat starch, also called clarified flour, will be used to make some Cantonese dim sum, crystal shrimp dumplings and so on, with good transparency, and made to look good.
Diamond starch
Character: fine texture, glossy, suitable for making desserts.
Application: It is the starch extracted from the rhododendron, white in color, glossy, powdery, fine and smooth, sticky, but poor water absorption. The pasting temperature is higher than that of corn starch and potato starch, so it is seldom used in the kitchen. It has fine texture and strong water absorption.
Lotus root starch
Characteristics: High transparency, suitable for desserts
Application: Lotus root starch is a gluten-free powder. It is ground from dried lotus root and used as a thickener in Chinese and Japanese cuisine. Lotus root starch has five major characteristics compared with other starches:
The first is that lotus root starch has a unique rich and fragrant odor, which is not found in other starches;
Secondly, take a little lotus root starch and rub it with your fingers, its texture is more delicate and smooth than other starches, smooth as fat and no foreign shape; thirdly, take a small amount of lotus root starch and put it into your mouth and touch the saliva, it will be dissolved very quickly, while other starches not only are not easy to be dissolved after entering the mouth, but also will be stuck together or in the form of a mass;
Fourth, pure lotus root starch contains a lot of iron and reducing sugar and other ingredients, and air contact, very easy to oxidize, so that the color of the powder from white to reddish. Other starches (such as sweet potatoes, potatoes and water chestnuts, kudzu root and other starches) do not have this change, are pure white or slightly yellow;
Five is to take a little lotus root starch with a small amount of cold boiled water, and then mix with boiling water, then cooked and edible, its water-absorbing distensibility up to eight or nine times the color of the cooked paste is slightly red, more amber-colored, glossy crystal. After cooling for a few hours, the thick cooked paste will become thin paste. Other starches need to be heated and boiled on the stove to eat, their water absorption and toughness are not as good as the lotus root starch, more white or brown color, and opaque, even after cooling, even if placed for more than ten hours, but also just a circle around the edge of the bowl was thin slurry, the middle part of the coagulation is still unchanged.