The Process of Thickening and Gelling

Polysaccharides are very large molecules made of many (poly) sugar molecules (saccharides) linked one to the next. Often thousands of sugar molecules are linked together in a single polysaccharide molecule. Sometimes all sugar molecules in a polysaccharide are the same, but often there is a mix of two or more different sugars. What distinguishes one polysaccharide from another is the type of sugar that makes it up, how many are linked together, and how they are linked. Recall from Chapter 8, for example, that starch molecules are made up of glucose sugars, and inulin consists primarily of fructose. Besides being different in the type of sugar, starch and inulin differ in the number of sugars. Starch, with thousands of sugar units, is a much more effective thickener and gelling agent than inulin, which has at most sixty sugars. Both, however, are classified as polysaccharides.