A
study about the effects of emulsifiers on the surface microstructure
of rice pasta demonstrated that the restricted swelling power of
starches was desirable for maintenance of surface shape (Lai, 2002),
and this theory might also be used to explain the difference in the
surface of rice noodles improved by MS in our study.
Fig. 2B illustrates the cross-section of raw rice noodles. Clearly,
starch granules were gelatinized and the network of rice gels made
from R95:M5 was much more compacted. The cross-section of
starch noodles resulted from retrogradation (Kasemsuwan et al.,
1998), and thus the result in Fig. 2B might be attributed to the
difference in retrogradation between R100:M0 and R95:M5. This
difference in turn could be used to explain the improvement in
elasticity, the decrease in cooking loss and the variation in textural
characteristics for rice noodles made from R95:M5.