Pregelatinised Tapioca Starch

About This Product

Pregelatinised tapioca starch, also sold as alpha starch, is ordinary tapioca starch that has been cooked and dried before it ever reaches the customer. The granules are gelatinised on a heated drum and the resulting film is milled back to powder. Because the starch has already been through its gelatinisation step, it swells and builds viscosity in cold water, with no cook and no energy input.

That single property is the whole reason to buy it. A native starch has to be heated through its gelatinisation range before it thickens anything, which means a kettle, a heat exchanger or a steam line. A pregelatinised grade thickens on contact with water at ambient temperature, which is what makes instant soups, instant desserts and dry sauce mixes possible: the consumer adds water and the product builds body in seconds.

The trade-off is viscosity and texture. Drum drying ruptures the granule, so the paste it gives is weaker and shorter than the same starch cooked conventionally, and it will not hold up to the shear, acid or retort conditions a cross-linked grade is bought for. It is also hygroscopic, which is why it is supplied drier than the other grades, at 8 per cent moisture against 14, and why it needs to be kept sealed.

Beyond instant foods it has two uses that have nothing to do with eating. It is an effective pellet binder in compound animal feed, where cold binding avoids a second cooking step, and it is used as a binder for charcoal and biomass briquettes, where the starch gel holds the fines together until the briquette is dried. Those industrial uses tolerate a lower whiteness, which is why this grade is specified at 85 per cent against the 92 per cent of the food grades.

Bio Green Foods supplies pregelatinised tapioca starch in 25 kg paper bags, palletised bags and jumbo bags. Starch content, moisture, Brabender viscosity and whiteness are confirmed on the agreed specification and on the batch certificate of analysis.