Building Better Coated Nuts

When creating new products or reformulating existing products, food technologists regularly strive to deliver an improved version that differentiates itself via healthful qualities, like reduced calorie or fat levels, or improved sensory characteristics—or perhaps both. Manufacturers also continually strive to reduce manufacturing costs.

Such is the case with coated nuts, value-added snacks that manufacturers frequently fry to create an appealingly crispy coating. Baking the nuts—while healthier—tends to result in a harder, less-crispy, coated nut. While ELIANE™ potato starches from AVEBE work in fried coated-nut applications, they also enable fat-free baked coated nuts while maintaining a desirable texture.

“The ELIANE product line, the world’s first amylopectin potato starches, permits high—yet controlled —expansion during baking or frying to deliver a light, crispy bite with ‘melt-in-the-mouth’ characteristics without masking flavors,” says Anne Tieleman, Ph.D., market manager. The starches also help designers create a uniformly smooth coated nut. Coatings of various thicknesses are possible, from super-thin, practically invisible coatings up to those about 0.5 cm thick. Thicker coatings caused by using starches with high expansion result in higher-volume nuts with lower coating use levels. This can translate into cost savings by adding bulk to the finished product.

Native cook-up starches affect texture and expansion. ELIANE 100, a native cook-up potato starch, facilitates high expansion and a crispy bite. Pre-gelatinized starch enhances water binding to increase adhesion of the coating to the nut while helping determine the bite and texture of the coating. ELIANE C 100, a pre-gelatinized potato starch, permits controlled high expansion and very crispy texture; and ELIANE EZ 100, also a pre-gelatinized potato starch, gives very high expansion, a soft yet crispy texture with “melt-in-the-mouth” characteristics. Coatings are typically added by dipping nuts into batter or via a wetted powder applied in a coating pan. Tieleman notes the ELIANE starch technology combined with the company’s snack application expertise provides snack producers with a wide range of textures, and various combinations of these starches can help yield a wide range of characteristics in the finished product. AVEBE has developed several formulas based on ELIANE starches combined with wheat flour or potato granules—and sometimes sugar and salt—for use in a rotating coating pan. The coatings can be customized low to high expansion, a very soft to hard initial bite, and crispy to very crispy crunch.

The ELIANE starches for coated nuts are not chemically modified. Therefore, they help permit a clean label. 

AVEBE/Farbest Brands 
160 Summit Avenue 
Montvale, NJ 07645 
Phone: 800/897-6096 201/573-4900 
Fax: 201/573-0404 
E-mail: [email protected] 
Websites: www.farbest.com  
www.avebe.com