Puffed Products Ready-to-eat Breakfast and Starch-based...

Starch-based snacks and ready-to-eat breakfast cereal continue to increase in sales worldwide. Starch-based snacks are commonly made in the form of puffed products. Puffed products are appreciated mainly for their lightness and crispness. These qualities are related to the air cellular structure and degree of expansion. Puffing is a process used for engineering structures and properties of food materials to give a light, airy and crispy texture (Nath and Chattopadhyay, 2008; Mariotti et al., 2006). Process for making starch-based puffed products includes gelatinization of starch, cooling, drying, and then explosive expansion (Hoke et al., 2007). After starch gelatinization, retrogradation of starch molecules, amylose and amylopectin occurred during cooling and aging of the pastes (Perdon et al., 1999; Ji et al., 2007; Mariotti et al., 2009). The amylose-amylopectin ratio, which commonly reported in term of amylose content, has been known to be an important parameter affecting phys ical properties of starch pastes/gels and characteristics of puffed products (Hibi and Hikone, 1998; Boischot et al., 2003; Cheow et al., 2004; Saeleaw and Schleining, 2010). The retrograded amylose prepared for the crystal nuclei, which can increase the nuclei crystal growth, so the higher amylose content, the faster starch retrograded (Biliaderis, 1992) which showed high retrogradation enthalpy (Vandeputte et al., 2003; Narpinder et al., 2006) and provided the harder gel. For rice flour