Wax‐Based Oleogels—Properties in Medium Chain Triglycerides and Canola Oil

Abstract

The non-triglyceride structuring of liquid oils, so-called oleogelation, enables new and more beneficial product designs. Natural waxes have proven to be excellent oleogelators due to their wide availability and low inclusion levels. However, waxes vary greatly in their compositions and contain different proportions of major components: wax esters (WE), fatty acids (FA), fatty alcohols (FaOH), and hydrocarbons (HC). In this study six waxes (bees (BW)-, sunflower (SFW)-, ricebran(RBW), carnauba (CRW)-, candelilla (CLW)-, and sugarcane wax(SCW)) are selected to develop a pairwise assessment regarding the major components. Commercial canola oil, rich in minor and polar components, and medium-chain triglycerides (MCT), as a "clean" saturated solvent, are used to elucidate the effect of solvent type on the gel forming behavior of 10% w/w oleogels. The gels are analyzed rheologically, penetronomically, microscopycally, and by calorimetry. It can be shown that the solubility and presence of polar minor components are crucial factors in oleogelation. Practical applications: Useful areas of application can be found in products with high proportions of saturated and trans fatty acids, a high potential of substitution, and can for instance include bakery-, meat-, culinary-and confectionary products.

Effect of Cooling Rate on the Oleogel Properties of Wax–Wax-Hydrolyzate Mixtures

“…The undercooling observed for SFWh gels is similar to the one observed for BW, while BWh gels show higher undercooling. By linear fitting of the DoH versus undercooling data of different waxes obtained from our recent study [10], the undercooling could be predicted quite well for the systems investigated in this work. The predicted values are illustrated as triangles (∆) in Fig.…”

“…In another contribution of ours, we introduced the socalled Degree of Homogeneity (DoH) to better characterize differently composed waxes in terms of their wax ester quantity and quality [10]. This was primarily done since the wax esters are thought to be the most important major components contributing to network formation.…”

“…Waxes with a high degree of homogeneity (DoH, see also Eq. ( 1)), hence high amounts of wax esters homogeneously distributed, showed lower undercooling [10]. In addition, the wax ester chain length disparity (Eq.…”

“…Due to their multicomponent character, different combinations of waxes and solvents exhibit substantial differences in gel characteristics. Recent contributions illustrated this property [9,10], disclosing the effect of minor components and oil type on oleogels based on combinations of different waxes with either sunflower-, canola-or MCT-oil. A wide range of differences were found, from critical gelling concentration (CGC), thermal behavior to macroscopic oleogel properties like firmness.…”

Wax based oleogels and their application in sponge cakes

“…25 In summary, the rheological studies on the oleofoams show that the foaming behavior of different oleogels cannot be straightforwardly predicted for the properties of the oleogels. 31,37 This is due to several factors. The oleofoams studied vary significantly in the volume of the dispersed gas phase (Fig.…”