General Mills Pursues Patent Of Low-Calorie Dough

By Sam Lewis

New ingredients and processing techniques have given the food manufacturer the means to reduce calories in many of its dough-based foods

One of the main ingredients of any dough or batter-based food is flour. Consequently, flour is usually the culprit of a high-calorie count in these products. However, in response to the growing trend of reducing the caloric content of food, General Mills aims to patent processes it uses to reduce calories in its pasta and other flour-rich products.

General Mills’ patent application for the calorie-reducing process was published on Dec 5, 2013. The application describes the makeup of a dough-based product with reduced flour, resulting in a lower-calorie end product. But cutting the amount of flour by itself doesn’t provide the correct composition of dough-based products to complete the extrusion process.

This is where General Mills’ engineers got creative. The inventors created a dough made of smaller amounts of flour, alginate (a sugar often extracted from seaweed), a sugar modifying agent, and water. The dough is then given a salt bath of calcium and/or magnesium allowing for the reduced-flour dough to keep its structure when shaping the final product while maintaining the desired texture in processing. Alginate is used in amounts ranging from 0.5 percent to 4 percent of dough products by weight. It is used because it is an excellent absorber of water and has the natural ability to form a gel, replicating the properties of products with high-flour content. This also allows the dough to keep its shape after extrusion from a die, creating the final food product.

The source of flour and its added ingredients is also being examined by General Mills. Flour can be derived from many sources — barley, corn, oats, potatoes, rice, soy, fruits and vegetables — to help reduce the calorie content of dough. Further, adding fruits and vegetables — whole pieces, ground powder, or pureed — into the dough mixture reduces the amount of flour needed (typically between 0 percent and 40 percent by weight), and as a result, reducing the total calorie content of the end product. Ingredients such as konjac glucomannan, guar gum, hydroxypropylmethycellulose, methycellulose, carrageenan, and xantham gum are added to modify textures. These textures range from kneadable dough for bread products such as biscuits and rolls, to pourable batters for desserts, pancakes, and waffles.

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