flour as starch. Flour has a distinct wheat
flavor that cooks often transform by
precooking the flour before adding it to a
sauce (p. 617). The suspended particles of
gluten protein make flour-based sauces
especially opaque and give their surface a
matte appearance, unless the sauce is cooked
for hours and skimmed to remove the gluten.
Cornstarch Cornstarch is practically pure
starch and so a more efficient thickener than
flour. Cornstarch is manufactured by soaking
the whole maize grain, milling it coarsely to
remove the germ and hull, and grinding,
sieving, and centrifuging the remainder to
separate the seed proteins. The resulting
starch is washed, dried, and reground into a
fine powder consisting of single granules or
small aggregates. During this wet processing,
the starch granules absorb odors and develop
their own when their traces of lipids are
oxidized, so cornstarch has a distinctive flavor