91É«ÇéƬ

One of the curses of the kitchen is finding that frozen foods such as puddings go gooey the instant you thaw them out. Often, the ingredient to blame is starch, which separates out into solid and liquid components on thawing. Now a team led by Stephen Jobling at Unilever Research in Bedford has developed a potato starch that doesn’t do this. Potato starch normally contains two major polymers, but by blocking three key genes Jobling’s team skewed starch production in the potato towards amylopectin, which is the stickier of the two. The resulting starch survived at least five freeze-thaw cycles without damage, the researchers reveal in Nature Biotechnology (vol 20, p 295).