Food Starch Excluding Flour

Pure starch is not much used in bakery products. Some maize starch goes into a few types of biscuits or cakes under the heading of corn flour . A few starch gels are applied on bakery flans. 

These are sometimes referred to as oils and fats. The only difference between the two is that materials are normally referred to as fats if they are solids at room temperatures and oils if they are liquids. The terminology is not always consistent as the material from coconut is normally referred to as coconut oil when in fact it is a hard fat. Most animal fats are solid at room temperature while most vegetable oils are liquid at room temperature. However, there are animal fats that are liquid at ambient temperatures and vegetable fats that are solid. 

Fats are used as ingredients in bakery products because they perform some function. As fats are generally more expensive than most other ingredients, commercial pressure would have eliminated them otherwise. In some cases the function of a fat can be either partially or completely replaced by some other ingredient, typically an emulsifier. 

Fatty acids can then be classified by their degree of unsaturation as well as their chain length. Thus, fatty acids are either saturated if they have no double bonds or unsaturated. Unsaturated fatty acids are further subdivided into monounsaturated diunsaturated and so on. Fatty acids with many double bonds are classed as polyunsaturated. Table 3 gives the approximate fatty acid compositions of several fats and oils, Table 4 lists the unsaturated fatty acids found in milk (note the very wide diversity). 

When attempts were first made to substitute vegetable fats for animal fats the limited supply of hard vegetable fats, e.g. coconut, was a 

---