the steaming process, the driving force for the water migration might be the gradient of water content, in the increase of water absorption. Besides, the decrease in water absorption of noodles was found to be the largest among three different noodles, which may be related to their higher cooking losses, since water absorption ability takes into account not only water uptake but also the cooking loss. Moreover, the results clearly illustrated that water absorption occurred mainly in the boiling process
3.2. Noodle texture analysis
Texture of cooked noodles is one of the major quality attributes that determine consumer acceptance of the product. In this study aspects of noodle texture were detected using two methods including textural profile analysis (TPA), and tensile test which assessed the breaking strength of noodles. Textural attributes of frozen cooked noodles were measured and summarized in Fig. 2 Yellow alkaline noodles were much higher
both in hardness and tensile force than other noodles, which concurred with Fu (2008) who reported that noodles made with alkaline reagents had a firmer texture than those made with salt alone. In addition, steaming increased the hardness and tensile force of three frozen cooked noodles to various extent. During the first 3 min, significant (P 0.05) in tensile force was found for all the noodles, and there was no significance (P 0.05) with increased steaming time (Fig. 2b). The hardness followed the similar ten dency (Fig. 2a). This behavior can be explained by the formation of a tight protein network, which embedded the starch granules and resulted in a stronger structure (Zweifel, & Escher, 2000). With the increase of time from 4 to 8 min, steaming might have a small effect on of protein and of starch, resulting in a little change in texture.