Corn protein promising for gluten-free bread

Gluten plays a crucial role in giving bread its chewy, elastic texture and has proven difficult to replace when formulating gluten-free bread. A team of chemists working with the United States Department of Agriculture have been seeking to mitigate these difficulties, and have recently reported positive findings using defatted corn protein.

The team began working with a dough comprising zein (a class of prolamine protein found in maize), together with starch, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, sugar, salt, yeast and water. However when they tried to bake the mixture as leavened rolls, the dough became flat, prompting further experimental work.

Through the use of bench-scale defatting of the zein component the total lipid content was reduced from 8 to 6.6%. Aggregation experiments and microscopy showed when surface-defatted, the zein particles aggregated more easily and also lowered the temperature at which protein cross-linking occurred by 2°C.

Following the defatting process, the dough was more similar to wheat dough and formed free-standing rolls that resembled rolls made using wheat flour. As a result, the researchers are hopeful their work could lead to the development of more palatable gluten-free breads.

Reference: Schober et al. 2010. Journal of Cereal Science Vol 52(3). Pp 417-425 DOI:10.1016/j.jcs.2010.07.004