Mung bean starch makes the sturdiest Red Bull jelly candy
Food Science
The starch in your kitchen pantry, whether scraped from a potato or milled from corn or mung beans, behaves completely differently when it sets into a gel, which is exactly the kind of plant chemistry that determines whether your homemade jams, puddings, or jellies hold their shape.
Gwapyeon is a wobbly Korean dessert traditionally made by boiling fruit juice with starch until it sets into a jelly. Here, researchers swapped in Red Bull for the fruit juice and tested three different plant starches, corn, mung bean, and potato, to see which one gave the sturdiest texture and the tastiest result. It turns out the plant a starch comes from changes everything about how a gel holds together.
Key Findings
1
Corn, mung bean, and potato starches were directly compared for their ability to set Red Bull into a stable gwapyeon gel
2
Structural integrity (gel firmness and stability) varied noticeably depending on which starch source was used
3
Consumer acceptability testing was used alongside texture measurements to identify the best-performing starch for taste and mouthfeel
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Technical Summary
Food scientists compared corn, mung bean, and potato starch to build a firmer, better-tasting version of gwapyeon, a jiggly Korean starch jelly, mixed with Red Bull energy drink.
The mung bean or green gram is a plant species in the legume family. It is mainly cultivated in East, Southeast, and South Asia and used as an ingredient in both savoury and sweet dishes.
