Summary
A Spanish technological center offers an alveographic test for whole wheat flours, providing useful information about the behavior of flour doughs with which products such as bread, cookies, biscuits are made. This test is used to determine the viscoelastic (rheological) properties of doughs formed from flour, hydration with salt water and kneading.
They are looking for commercial agreement with companies interested in their test or in this kind of technology.
Description
The technological center, based in Palencia, Spain, has a research and development department, responsible of this test. In recent years there has been a growing interest in whole grain products. However, few studies have analysed the influence of whole wheat flour and its characteristics on the physicochemical properties and its impact on the quality of bread or other products.
Although numerous tests developed to characterize white flours and predict the dough behaviour on manufacturing lines, most of them are not applicable to whole wheat flours. This happens, for example, with one of the most important and most demanded tests in the characterization of flours in Spain: the alveographic test. The problem presented by the standardized method (ISO 27971) and developed for white flours is that, applied to whole wheat flours, the doughs are very hard, poorly developed, they take minutes to extrude, the dough does not have extensibility and the graphs obtained are reduced, practically, to an ascending line. It has been necessary to introduce changes to analyse alveographically a dough with 100% whole wheat flour.
The technological behavior of refined wheat flours and whole wheat flours is totally different. The working protocol of the alveographic test has been adapted to be used in the analysis of whole wheat flours, introducing several changes such as sample preparation, pump pressure, dough hydration. These changes allow obtaining an extensible mass. Knowledge and control on technical sheets of raw materials allows:
- Obtention of a homogeneous product
- Preventing, managing, and effectively resolving problems
Predicting flours behavior in the factory is complex and for this reason, it is important to have different tests that complement each other to keep the manufacturing process under control.
They seek collaborations with companies in bakery/pastry manufacturing sector, interested in characterizing and controlling the quality of their whole wheat flours.