The situation
A noodle manufacturer had high cooking loss and a soft, sticky product with cloudy cooking water. The response so far had been at the cooking step: shorter times, lower water temperature, different instructions on the pack. None of it had worked.
Why it is hard
A starch noodle has no gluten. There is no protein network holding it together, so the entire structure of the product is retrograded starch, and specifically retrograded amylose, which forms a firm network that resists melting again in hot water.
Cooking loss is not mainly a cooking problem. It is a report on how completely the starch retrograded before the noodle ever reached the pan.
Amylose that never reassociated is the most mobile material present and the first thing to leave into the water, taking yield with it and leaving the surface sticky.
Everywhere else in food manufacturing retrogradation is the enemy. Here it is the product, and a formulator arriving from bakery or from sauces will specify exactly the wrong raw material.
What was done
The starch was specified by amylose content rather than by viscosity curve, because the viscosity curve describes gelatinisation and the product is built by what happens afterwards. The ageing step was treated as a process parameter with a time and a temperature rather than as dead time between operations, since retrogradation is fastest just above freezing. Drying was slowed at the surface so that the interior could reorder before the outside set.
What it shows
That the answer sat three steps upstream of the symptom, at the point of greatest leverage and least attention.
