Extraction of gluten from food material

Abstract

Primarily, “gluten” (from Latin for “glue”) has been defined as “the rubber-like proteinaceous mass that remains, when wheat dough is washed with water or salt solution to remove soluble constituents and starch granules”. The procedure of wheat gluten preparation was first described by Beccari in 1745 and is nowadays widely used for the industrial isolation of “vital gluten”, a byproduct of wheat starch production. Gluten is a protein fraction from wheat, maida, barley, oats or their crossbred varieties and derivatives thereof, to which some people are intolerant and that is insoluble in water and 0.5 M NaCl. These proteins that naturally occur in a prohibited grain and that may cause adverse health effects in persons in celiac disease. Some food processing procedures increase gluten’s solubility, but do not necessarily diminish the protein fraction’s harmful effect.1‒5