What are natural thickeners and how to use them

Cooking thickeners are used to thicken sauces, puddings, pie fillings, soups, stews, and many other recipes. But which one is the best for your recipe?

First, let’s look at the characteristics of thickeners for cooking. The most used thickenerss come from a starch base. Starch is made up of thousands of sugar molecules often found in grains like wheat and corn or tubers and roots like potatoes and arrowroot.

The starches are thickened by a process called gelatinization which breaks the intermolecular bonds of starch molecules in the presence of water and heat (from 60ºC), allowing the hydrogen bonding sites (hydrogen hydroxyl and oxygen) to attract more water. This irreversibly dissolves the starch granule.

The vegetable gums (guar gum and xanthan gum) are other options to thicken your recipes.