Soy Flour Improves Taste of Microwaveable Foods

It's the holy grail of many food manufacturing companies: a microwaveable product that tastes as good as traditionally cooked foods.

It's particularly hard to replicate that "just out of the oven" taste when it comes to baked goods. Most people want their bakery items to be slightly crispy, but microwaving breaded items often leaves them soggy or rubbery.

This is because the microwave oven essentially reverses the cooking method of the traditional oven. Traditional ovens cook food from the outside in, and pull fluids away from foods in the process. Microwave ovens cook food from the inside out, often driving fluids towards the surface of the product and effectively steaming the outer layers.

But according to a new report published in the Journal of Food Science, soy flour may be the solution to this problem.

According to food industry news, replacing 20% of the standard wheat flour with soy flour in microwaveable products lead to "better textual results" when products were cooked from frozen in the microwave.

Breadings or bakery items were less soggy or rubbery, and more likely to retain a crispy texture prized by consumers.

Americans love their convenience foods, and frozen foods are a $56 billion dollar-per-year business, making news like this exciting to say the least.

Since soy flour comes in three types - full-fat, low-fat, and fat-free - food manufacturers can also experiment with different types of soy flour to create the formula that best suits their particular product, and pleases their target demographic.