DIY corn sticks recipe. Corn sticks - health benefits and harms

Corn sticks(see photo) is one of children’s favorite sweet treats. The finished product is presented in the form of shaped dried foam, which is made from corn grits.

The very first to come up with this product were the American brothers John and Will Keith Kellogg, who founded a medical sanatorium in the USA. They decided to prepare dishes for the patients using maize flour. But since there was a lot of dough left, and it was a pity to throw it away, the rest of the dough was passed through special rollers. Thus, flakes appeared, which were then fried in sunflower oil and presented as a dessert for tea.

The familiar corn sticks in their current form first appeared in 1963 at the Dnepropetrovsk plant for the production of food concentrates, where the production of the product took place according to the specified technology and on the one developed by V.Ya. Krikunov. equipment.

Today there are quite a lot of varieties of such corn products. The product can be not only sweet, but also salty, glazed, creamy, chocolate, with the taste of bacon, cheese, cinnamon, vanillin, lemon.. In addition, some manufacturers make the sticks multi-colored and also make the product gluten-free and sugar-free.

Compound

The main composition of real corn sticks includes the following products:

deodorized sunflower oil;
corn grits;
salt;
powdered sugar.

The calorie content of this product is quite high, so you should not abuse it so as not to harm your health.

How are corn sticks made at the factory?

The process of making corn sticks at the plant takes no more than ten minutes, so the company’s workers can make more than three tons of this product per shift. The production of natural sticks is as follows:

Corn grits are placed in an extruder (special equipment for kneading dough into sticks). There, under the influence of a temperature of one hundred and fifty degrees and strong pressure, it turns into a homogeneous dough.
Then the corn mass passes through a special matrix with holes of different shapes, which gives the sticks the desired appearance.
After the extrusion stage, the sticks are still wet and should therefore be further glazed and tumble dried.
As soon as the sticks fall into a special drum, they will begin to dry and various flavoring additives will be sprayed on top of them, as well as warm sunflower oil.
Next, the oil-soaked sticks are sent to another compartment of the drum, where they are completely immersed in powdered sugar. Due to the fact that there is warm oil on the sticks, the powder will begin to melt and turn into a sweet glaze.

The corn sticks are ready and ready to pack.

Benefits and harms

Corn sticks are not particularly beneficial because they contain a large amount of carbohydrates. Therefore, many experts recommend eating as many sticks a day as can fit in one hand, and only as a dessert for tea after the main meal, otherwise the product may cause constipation.

Many doctors do not recommend giving corn sticks to children under three years of age, since the young body cannot yet cope with large amounts of carbohydrates, and also in order not to provoke the development of an allergy to the sticks.

In addition, during pregnancy and breastfeeding you should avoid eating chopsticks. Since the product has a high calorie content, it can cause unwanted weight gain in a pregnant woman. A nursing mother should not eat them either, so that the baby does not have bloating, constipation, or an allergy to the new product.

Since the corn product contains many calories, it should not be eaten during a diet. Also, people who have had their gallbladder removed should not use chopsticks.

What can you cook?

You can make many different sweet desserts for tea with corn sticks. The sticks are mainly used for making cakes with condensed milk, toffee, honey, pastries, and rolls.

The product is also great for making cookies, rafaello, chips, and sweet sausages.

As an independent dish, corn sticks can be eaten for breakfast by pouring milk over them. In addition, the product can be eaten simply, washed down with tea or milk.

How to do it at home?

Making corn sticks at home is quite simple, since the process does not require special equipment (an extruder). Therefore, the housewife will not have much difficulty making natural homemade corn sticks.

To prepare sticks at home, you need to pour about seventy milliliters of homemade milk into a saucepan and add about fifty grams of butter. Boil the liquid, add half a glass of corn flour and stir continuously so that there are no lumps. The mass should be of uniform consistency. Then you should let the milk-corn mixture cool, and then beat in two eggs and mix thoroughly.

Place the dough in a special pastry bag and squeeze out into small “sausages” onto a warm baking sheet. Place the sticks in the oven and bake until done. Sprinkle the finished hot product with powder and you can serve it.

Below is a video on how to make corn sticks.

Many people clearly associate certain sweets with childhood. This includes ice cream, lemonade and, of course, corn sticks. How this airy delicacy is made at the factory and whether it is possible to make sticks at home, you will find out in this article.

What are corn sticks made from?

Raw materials for the production of corn sticks are immediately supplied to the plant in large quantities. Literally tons of it are delivered to the enterprise. The raw materials are made from durum corn, powdered sugar, salt and refined deodorized vegetable oil. These are all the ingredients required to make corn sticks, familiar to everyone since childhood.

The composition or with a different flavor is similar, but instead of powdered sugar, simply salt or an appropriate flavoring is added, such as bacon, cheese, etc.

Equipment for making corn sticks

The production line for the production of corn sticks includes several types of equipment: a mixer for preparing cereals, a mill for producing powdered sugar, an extruder, a coating complex, a powdered sugar dispenser and a device that packages corn sticks. How products are made at the factory and at home and in what volume depends on the power of the extruder. By the way, the same equipment is used in the production of other breakfast cereals.

The device for making sticks comes in low, medium and high power. It is suitable for small, medium businesses and large factories respectively. In the first case, the productivity will be 30 kg of products per hour, in the second - 100 kg per hour, in the third - 250 kg per hour.

Corn sticks: how they are made at the factory

Thus, the cost of equipment depends on the size of the enterprise. How are corn sticks made at the factory?

The entire technological process takes no more than 10 minutes. During an 8-hour production shift, about three tons of sweet treats are produced. The production process itself consists of several stages:

First, corn grits are fed to an extruder, the temperature inside of which ranges from 40 to 150 degrees.
Under the influence of high temperature and pressure, the raw material acquires the consistency of dough.
The plastic mass falls onto a special matrix with holes, when passing through which the dough sharply increases in size, as if exploding and acquiring the structure of a corn stick. This happens due to a sharp change in pressure. The shape and size of the holes on the matrix determine what the corn sticks will be: round, square, star-shaped, etc.

The sticks that come out of the extruder remain too wet, so they do not have their own taste and do not yet crunch on the teeth. To do this, they need to be glazed and dried in a special drum.

How to make corn sticks with flavoring additives

At the next stage, after the products leave the extruder, they are dried in a special drum. Next, the sticks enter the coating complex - this is a device that resembles a long drum, with the help of which powdered flavoring additives are applied to the products. At the same time, vegetable oil is supplied through the sprayer. It is heated inside the drum and sprayed evenly in a small amount onto the corn sticks. How are they glazed? Read on.

After the sticks are saturated with oil, they go into the next compartment of the drum. Here they are sprinkled with powdered sugar on all sides. When it comes into contact with warm vegetable oil, it melts, forming a sweet glaze on top of the product. At the next stage, ready-made sticks come out of the drum. Then they are packaged by special equipment in automatic mode. Finished sticks are packaged and sent to the warehouse, and then directly to the wholesale buyer.

How to make corn sticks at home

You won’t be able to make corn sticks at home without special equipment. Products acquire an air structure only when passing through an extruder, which provides the necessary sharp pressure drop. Neither a traditional screw meat grinder, nor especially in this case, can replace professional equipment.

How to make corn sticks at home? Very quickly if equipment and raw materials are available. First of all, for this you will need a special apparatus for making corn sticks UKP-M. The productivity of the device is 15 kg of products per hour.

To prepare the sticks, corn grits are first poured into a special funnel on the body, passed through a humidification system and subjected to thermoplastic processing. The entire process occurs almost instantly in a continuous mode. Then the mass is pressed at a certain speed through a special matrix with cutting, which gives the required shape to the finished product. The simplest corn sticks are ready! Now they need to be coated with glaze or sprinkled with powdered sugar, and they can be served.

In addition to corn sticks, the UKP-M device is used for the production of products from wheat, pearl barley, rice in the shape of stars, tubes, etc.

While riding a bicycle in the evening along the streets and alleys in search of something interesting, I suddenly came across a production process organized in the back of a small truck. There was a miniature production line there for the production of some strange product for me. The rattling machine was squeezing out a long yellow tube of porous consistency through a round hole. The tube crawled out of the hole and, colliding with an obstacle in the form of the walls of the body, twisted into rings at its bottom.

1. Machine for making corn sticks (in this case, these are tubes)

Nearby there was a counter with kozinaki made from a variety of puffed cereals and their mixtures, pressed into rectangular bars. I braked sharply. A long yellow snake crawling out of the opening of a rattling car caught my attention. I caught the seller's attention. He noticed my curiosity and surprise. He broke off a rather long piece of the tube and handed it to me. Having tried it, I immediately knew what it was. In taste, color and appearance, it was no different from Russian corn sticks. The only thing it was missing was some powdered sugar on the surface. I took a closer look at the typewriter. Certainly! There's also a container with corn grits, which I didn't notice at first. Corn grits enter the machine, where they are heated to a high temperature and melted. The resulting mass is then pressed through a round hole.

2. The seller packs the straws

3. Counter with kozinaki and straws

4. Buyer

The seller was already standing at the back of the truck, I met a yellow corn “snake”, breaking off pieces from it and packing them in plastic bags. People passing by immediately turned into buyers. They stopped briefly at the counter and then continued on their way, taking with them a bag of straws or kozinaki.
The seller seemed like a nice and pleasant person. He also treated me to puffed cereal kozinaki. It seemed that with his gesture he wanted to talk about how delicious the goods were on his counter. I liked them just as much as the seller himself, who set up his own small business on a street in the suburbs of Chengdu and does it with passion and love.

It is hardly possible to find at least one child, adult or respectable old man who does not know the taste of corn sticks. This crunchy treat has captivated us since childhood, along with ice cream, sweet soda, lollipops and cotton candy. We often take a package of treats with us on a walk, a picnic, to school, or to work so that we can have a tasty snack when we get hungry. Corn sticks store well and are inexpensive, so they can make excellent company for a traveler going on a trip.

History of Corn Delight

The ancestors of corn sticks were flakes made from this cereal. They were accidentally invented at the end of the 19th century by the brothers of the Kellogg family from America. While preparing porridge from maize flour (maize is sweet corn) for the guests of the Battle Creek sanatorium, they overlooked the process and overcooked the dish.

In order not to throw away an impressive portion of the product, resourceful, and perhaps practical and even greedy, owners of the establishment decided to make maize dough from the sticky mass. But after passing through the rollers, the pressed dough turned into flakes.

To improve the taste and make the corn flakes crispy, they are fried in aromatic corn oil. As a result, the product was saved and served as a new dish, which the guests of the sanatorium liked. Some time later, on May 31, 1895, US entrepreneurs received a patent for the “Technology for preparing Hulled Corn Cereals.”

About 50 years later, with the development of physics as a science and the introduction of extrusion technology into the food industry, the now familiar corn sticks began to be produced in the States. In the Soviet Union, the first production of this product was established in 1963 at the Food Concentrates Plant in the city of Dnepropetrovsk. Today, in many countries, large and small enterprises are successfully operating, producing corn sticks of various shapes, sizes and tastes.

Raw materials for the puffed treat, its composition and calorie content

The name of the crispy product speaks for itself: corn sticks are made from corn grits.

According to technology, it is advisable to use high quality hard, glassy corn. The cereal is crushed to the state of fine cereals or flour - this is the main ingredient of the delicacy (approximately 98-99% of the total mass of the finished product). It also contains refined vegetable oil (usually sunflower oil) and salt. The surface of the sticks is often glazed with powdered sugar.

As additional components, depending on the recipe, manufacturers add cocoa powder, artificial and food colors, flavors, flavorings (for example, “cheese”, “bacon”), flavor enhancers, preservatives, stabilizers. This is the composition of corn sticks.

The crispy and melt-in-your-mouth delicacy is very high in calories, which should be taken into account when preparing a fasting diet.

Attention! Calorie content of corn sticks: 520 kcal per 100 g.

Industrial production of corn sticks

The production of air sticks is a rather complex technological process that can only be carried out with special equipment. Before a food product, similar to dried oblong foam, is sold, the cereal crop is processed in several stages.

First, the grain is cleaned of the outer shell and germinal sprouts. Next, the cereal is thoroughly crushed and sifted. Salt and a little water are added to this raw material. The resulting mass is then extruded using an industrial extruder. In this apparatus, the raw materials are exposed to high temperature and pressure for a short time, as a result the mass acquires the consistency of plastic dough.

At the next stage, the corn mass enters the extruder matrix, which has holes of different shapes (the shape of the finished products depends on this, the outer edges of which can be round, square or star-shaped). A rapid change in pressure occurs on the matrix (its drop), as a result of which the adhesive mass seems to “explode”, foams, increasing in volume. An industrial knife cuts the released air sticks so that their length is on average 2-3 cm.

The corn sticks that just come out of the machine are a little moist and don’t have a crispy feel. To impart the desired qualities, they are dried in a special drum. After this, the product is sent to a coating complex, in which a thin layer of heated vegetable oil is sprayed onto the sticks and crushed flavoring additives are applied. Flavorings are also added here, powdered sugar, which melts when it hits the warm butter. When dry, it acquires the properties of glaze. The last stage is packaging of finished sticks and transportation to storage or point of sale.

The process of producing one portion of delicacy at factories takes an average of 10 minutes. Depending on the power of the devices, the manufacturer can produce from 1 to 3 tons of product during an 8-hour working day. Small enterprises more often purchase low-power devices, the efficiency of which is 30 kg of sticks per hour. Medium and large enterprises prefer devices with a capacity of 100 to 250 kg of finished product over a similar period of time.

The benefits and harms of a popular product

The question of the benefits and harms of corn sticks is primarily of concern to parents, because the main connoisseurs of the delicacy are children. During production, exposure to heat converts corn starch into components that are easily absorbed by the digestive system. When consuming the product, “fast carbohydrates” saturate the blood with glucose in a short period of time. And glucose provides the strength and energy that a growing body needs. If the product contains natural juices (fruit, vegetable), then its benefits increase even more.

However, excessive consumption of corn sticks, due to their impressive calorie content and high glycemic index, is not recommended for overweight people with diabetes. A product eaten in large quantities can also cause bloating due to increased formation of gases in the intestines.

An airy dessert that contains chemical flavoring and aromatic additives and preservatives is best excluded from the diet of children under 3 years of age and those with allergies. During the processing of raw materials, the bulk of the beneficial substances in the cereal are destroyed, dietary fiber is removed, which contributes to normal peristalsis and intestinal segmentation. For this reason, it is better not to overuse corn sticks, even if they are made without the addition of harmful components.

It is impossible to make sweet corn sticks at home without special equipment. A device such as a professional extruder cannot be replaced with a pastry bag or meat grinder.

Many people clearly associate certain sweets with childhood. This includes ice cream, cotton candy, lemonade and, of course, corn sticks. How this airy delicacy is made at the factory and whether it is possible to make sticks at home, you will find out in this article.

What are corn sticks made from?

Raw materials for the production of corn sticks are immediately supplied to the plant in large quantities. Literally tons of it are delivered to the enterprise. The raw materials are corn grits, which is made from durum corn, powdered sugar, salt and refined deodorized vegetable oil. These are all the ingredients required to make corn sticks, familiar to everyone since childhood.

The composition of salted or other flavored sticks is similar, but instead of powdered sugar, simply salt or an appropriate flavoring such as bacon, cheese, etc. are added.