In-vitro food mastication has been simulated by incorporating size reduction process, followed by incubation with human saliva. However, they do not suffice to simulate the actual oral breakdown process where disruption by mastication (chewing) and wetting/lubrication by salivation take place simultaneously. In this study, in-vitro oral digestion of rice gels with different amylose contents was simulated by instrumentally performing mastication and salivation. The hardness of artificial saliva-treated rice gels was distinctly lowered with increasing chewing cycles and the rice gels with high amylose contents showed the highest degradation rate. When the rice gels were subjected to non-destructive tomographic analysis, the high amylose rice gels were clearly shown to be favorably fragmented into smaller pieces by chewing, followed by the low and intermediate amylose samples. These results could be explained by their cohesive texture rather than hardness. Therefore, this study may help understanding the changes in the physical properties of cereal-based foods during oral digestion.

The noodle market has been worldwide expanding by the rising tide of the convenience food trend and various consumer acceptances. With this trend, a great deal of effort had been made to enhance the quality attributes of instant noodles to satisfy the demand of current consumers. In this presentation, two primary topics related to the quality attributes of noodles are discussed – production of non‐wheat noodles slit from sheeted dough and reduction of noodle cooking times. First, corn proteins were utilized to form a viscoelastic protein network of non‐wheat dough and their rheological and structural properties were characterized to prepare the noodles slit from sheeted dough. The extended β‐sheet alignment imparted high mixing stability to the non‐wheat dough that could be successfully sheeted and slit to noodle strands without gluten. Second, a novel thermal technology based on the modified transient plane source method was applied in order to characterize the cooking property of instant noodles. The porous structure of wheat‐based noodles was also built up to shorten their cooking times. After cooked, the porous‐structured noodles exhibited higher thermal conductivity and lower firmness, possibly indicating the shortened cooking time. 19