Guargum By Agro Gums

Guargum is useful as a thickening agent for water and as a reagent for adsorption and hydrogen bonding with mineral and cellulosic surfaces. It is an edible carbohydrate polymer.

It is non-ionic, free flowing, low pale white colored, coarse to fine grounded powder and is water-soluble hydrocolloids.

Guar gum is used as a thickener and emulsifier in commercial food processing. It has almost 8 times the thickening power as corn starch, and is used in dressings, sauces, milk products, and baking mixes. It is also used in paper manufacturing, textiles, printing, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.

a
Guar gum is an economical thickener and stabilizer. It hydrates fairly rapidly in cold water to give highly viscous pseudo plastic solutions of generally greater low-shear viscosity when compared with other hydrocolloids.

a
High concentrations (~ 1%) are very thixotropic but lower concentrations (~ 0.3%) are far less so.

a Guar gum is also emulsifier as it has more galactose branch points.

a It does not form gels but does show good stability to freeze-thaw cycles.

a Guar gum shows high low-shear viscosity but is strongly shear-thinning. Being non-ionic, it is not affected by ionic strength or pH but will degrade at pH extremes at temperature for e.g. pH 3 at 50A C. With case in, it becomes slightly thixotropic forming a biphasic system containing casein micelles.