Thermal effects on granules and direct determination of swelling capacity of starch from a cassava cultivar (Attiéké Mossi 1) cultivated in Côte D’Ivoire

Abstract

Food security assurance is a vital challenge that is still facing Africa today. Thus, numerous research topics have been oriented toward this agronomic aspect in order to increase food production. This is one of the reasons researches on crops were disregarded. This lack of scientific results led us to investigate the evolution of the granules size of cassava starch, according to the temperature and heating duration. It permitted the division of the ranges of temperature into 2 groups. The first, which consisted of 60, 65 and 70°C, was not able to induce starch gelatinization during the 30 min of heating; the second group, which consisted of 75, 80, 85 and 90°C, provoked the complete starch gelatinization before the end of the heating. This survey also confirmed that the small granules (diameter

10 μm) made a more elevated resistance than the thickest ones. Moreover, it confirmed that during the heating, the starch granules swelled to reach an optimum level of absorption before reaching their solubility. This observation led us to propose another determination method of swelling capacity than that of the Leach’s method. The so-called method, not only considered the mean size of granules at the optimum period of absorption, but also took into account total water absorbed by granules, since it was valued according to their size. The application of this method produced the swelling of the granules which was extensively elevated than that of Leach. At 90°C for example, the proposed method induced a swelling (73.09 g of water/g) raised 4 times more than the Leach’s method.