Introducing Daluga (Cyrtosperma merkusii) starch from corms collected in Siau Island, North Sulawesi

Abstract

Daluga (Cyrtosperma merkusii) found naturally growing at some sites inside Siau Island, North Sulawesi, Indonesia. This plant is an aroid, known as giant swamp taro, and its corm is edible. Very little information known about the plant and corm, and none for its starch. The tendency surfaced is that the plant has been abandoned despite of the corm potency may serve as food source. The same practices also happened around the islands on the same region: even the statistics shown that daluga is excluded from both food expenditure and food crops consideration (BPS 2013). For that reason, this research mainly focus on the study of daluga corm starch that has never been studied or reported before. The major findings are starch yield, chemical composition, and granules morphology studied from scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images. The data shows that daluga starch is unimodal with average size of 12.50 μm and crystalline type A. The average starch yield is 14.70%, and has medium to low amylose content that shall give good mouthfeel taste. These findings shall possibly support more research and utilization of daluga starch, improving people’s knowledge about it, thus it will benefit researchers or islands communities in the future, as it is a natural resource of food found on these islands of Indonesia.