Baking & Snack - May 2017 - 50

SHORTENINGS

A fat with a high solid
fat content and high
melting point will yield a
donut with the correct
mouthfeel and texture.
AAK

the donuts to set up when fried in palm
oil. Cargill addressed this with a reduced-palm shortening that provides a clean taste and faster
set time over standard
palm shortenings, Dr.
Satumba explained.
A common alternative to PHOs, higholeic oils do not
contain fat solids.
However, they can be
blended with fully hydrogenated soybean oil
or palm oils to achieve the
functionality bakers need, according to Duncan Guy, director of
technical services, Bunge Oils.
While semi-solid fats can prevent donuts from being
greasy, in snack foods it's the liquid-based fry oils that
do this job. "PHOs offered a longer fry life and impart
some unique properties to finished snack foods," Mr.
Cummisford said. "These can be mimicked or improved
on by using a variety of vegetable oils, including the higholeic ones along with antioxidants, both natural and synthetic." In snack foods where some solid fats are needed,
he suggested palm oil or animal fats could do the trick.
While fat may be functional in frying, the health implications cannot go unstated since that's why PHOs
were banned in the first place. "In applications such as
donut frying and heavy-duty frying, there have been
challenges replacing high-trans PHOs with low-trans
alternatives," Mr. Tiffany said. ADM offers a variety of
low-trans, non-PHO choices to meet such functional
demands. "Formulators wanting to use PHO alternatives while lowering saturated fats can use blends of
liquid oils with palm or palm fractions," he continued.
"Blends of liquid oils with interesterified hard stocks
or fully hydrogenated vegetable oils also are means
to provide lower saturated fat contents, depending
on the application."

Fresher, longer
Stability is the other key to frying oil - both its usage
and its impact on the finished food. "Oil stability determines oil frying life and food shelf life," Dr. Liu said.
The more stable the oil, the longer it can be used in
the fryer before it begins to break down. The faster that
happens, the more often the oil needs to be refreshed
in the fryer and the more often the fryer needs to be
cleaned, which leads to more downtime.
"The main culprit to oil instability is polyunsaturation," Mr. Flider said. "The more polyunsaturation you

50 Baking & Snack May 2017 / www.bakingandsnack.com

have in the oil, the more susceptible it is to oxidation or
instability." Oxidation goes hand-in-hand with shelf life.
With higher stability, frying oils last longer in the fryer,
and the donut, pastry or snack chip gets longer shelf life.
PHOs offered bakers and snack producers plenty of
stability - a quality that must also be achieved by any
replacement in the new PHO-free reality. Early attempts
to replace PHOs for frying faced challenges in stability,
but suppliers offer bakers and snack producers several
options now. "The early interesterified oils were a combination of the polyunsaturated oils like canola and commercial soy with the hard stock, and that left too many
polyunsaturates and too much room for oxidation," Mr.
Flider explained.
Canola and soy oil offer bakers and snack producers options low in saturated fat, but if not blended with
something more stable, these oils force formulators into
some trade-offs. "Liquid oils low in saturated fat like
soybean and canola oil can serve for frying but with a
shorter fry life and the risk of off-flavor development,"
Mr. Doucet said.
Today, high-oleic and palm oils can provide the stability necessary for fried foods. "On just a performance
level, PHOs and shortenings have historically provided
long fry life and good shelf stability at a cost-effective
price point," Mr. Guy said. "The vast majority of these
fry life and shelf stability needs can be met with Bunge's
non-PHO high-oleic options and blends."
Bunge's algae oil is heat stable with a high smoke
point, and the company also recently began offering a
non-GMO sunflower oil that has a longer fry life.
Mr. Doucet pointed out, however, that while higholeic oils have the desired oxidative stability to replace
PHOs, they do not have the capacity to form the semisolid structuring necessary for donut applications. To
work in applications that need fat solids, these oils need
to be blended with others.
Stratas Foods developed a next-generation high-oleic
soybean shortening. It uses the company's proprietary
Flex crystallization technology and a more stable liquid
oil component to provide a PHO alternative.
Frying fats have a lot of heavy lifting to do between
transferring heat and conferring onto baked goods and
snacks their final structures, flavors and textures. PHO
replacements must be able to accomplish both of these
tasks while also remaining efficient from a processing
standpoint. With some testing and strategizing with
food scientists, bakers and snack producers can find the
right solution for their frying fat needs.

Find resources for shortenings by visiting
www.esourcebaking.com. Browse by category under
Ingredients, and click on Major for listings.

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Baking & Snack - May 2017

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