Unraveling the mechanism of alleviating the textural deterioration of thermally sterilized cooked noodles: effect of gluten content and quality

Thermal sterilization is valuable for creating shelf-stable instant wet cooked noodles; however, it often leads to a poor texture. In this study, seven different reconstituted wheat flours were used to evaluate the impact of gluten content and quality on alleviating the textural deterioration of instant wet cooked noodles. Increasing the gluten content in wheat flour led to a higher hardness of instant wet cooked noodles, and the tensile distance significantly increased from 18.41 to 32.11 mm (p < 0.05). Conversely, as the glu/gli ratio decreased, the hardness decreased from 53.96 to 44.47 N, but the tensile distance significantly increased from 29.24 to 40.75 mm (p < 0.05). The rheological properties showed that a higher gluten content increased the elastic modulus at low strain and a lower glu/gli ratio reduced the deformation ratio at high strain. Size-exclusion high-performance liquid chromatography analysis revealed that less sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS)-extractable glutenin was retained in the noodles with a high gluten content and more SDS-extractable gliadin was preserved at a low glu/gli ratio. The confocal laser scanning microscopy results showed that a high gluten content induced a compact network and a low glu/gli ratio in wheat flour resulted in a continuous network.