Aggregation in cooked maize starch

This paper focuses on the aggregation of starch granules. The starch was cooked in a limiting amount of water and dispersed in different solvents. The size of the resulting aggregates was measured using light scattering. The solvents employed in this study (water, glycerol, ethanol, and 2-propanol) dispersed the aggregates to different degrees and resulted in different size distributions for the starch aggregates. It was observed that the size distribution of the cooked starch dispersed in the less polar solvents showed a higher representation of larger aggregates. Higher cooking temperatures resulted in larger aggregates. The methodology here presented proved to be a reproducible and practical way to study aggregation of starch.