Flour milling

Abstract

Question-is flour milling an art or a science? Answer-it is neither. It is a technology, the marrying of food science with the art of the practical miller, both of which have evolved over many years. Some may say that science will eventually overcome the art of milling and consign the practical miller to the flour bin of history, but with the variety of baking products still expanding daily and new wheat varieties being developed that event should still be quite a long time off. This chapter aims to help define the science and the art of a process which produces one of the most versatile of bakery raw materials and aims to provide a background to the link between wheat, the milling process and the properties of the final flour. Wheat has been a major food source for thousands of years. The unique properties of its proteins when hydrated have given it a flexibility which has made it ideal for a multitude of different bread products from the flat breads of the Mediterranean and equatorial countries, for example chapatti, pizza and ciabatta, through to the sandwich breads of Europe, America and Australia. We must remember that the wheat grain is a seed that is designed to protect the embryonic plant from the rigours of the outside world until conditions are right for its germination and subsequent growth. A representation of the structure of the wheat grain is given in Figure 12.1. The outer bran coat with its unique physical structure which folds the seed in on itself to form the characteristic crease protects the seed. As a result of this complex shape, milling engineers have spent many a sleepless night trying to find ways of breaking through these protective layers to extract the endosperm with its maximum food value. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.