May 20/Journal of Technology & Science -- "In the manufacture of cereal products, such as milling of wheat, the mixing of the dough, and baking of cakes and breads, because direct end-product testing is expensive and time consuming, it is popular for industry to utilize appropriate surrogates (representative indirect measurements) to predict various end-product outcomes. For some specific properties, such as milling yield, dough viscoelasticity, or bread loaf volume, the identification and validation of possible surrogates is a major motivating goal in the R&D of cereal science," scientists in Canberra, Australia, explain in a new report.
"For example, because end-product quality of many foods made from wheat flour is known to depend principally on the structural and rheological properties of the high-molecular weight protein fraction in the flour, the rheology of doughs made from wheat flours is an appropriate and popular choice for the surrogate. Equally important is the end-product testing of the flour milled from a wheat. In this situation, an appropriate surrogate is some measure of the rheology of grain hardness; namely, the deformation and fracturing of the wheat during the milling as a function of the mechanical properties of the various botanical layers within wheat kernels. The current popular measures are particle size index and single kernel characterization system (SKCS) hardness index. However, they are quite indirect and only single-value summaries of the mechanical strengths of the botanical layers.