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Characterizing and exploiting the rheology of wheat hardness

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Abstract

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. 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. An alternative strategy is the measurement (on an SKCS 4100 device) of a large number of individual crush response profiles which are averaged to produce a representative average crush response profile (aCRP), which can be viewed as an indirect measurement of the strengths of the internal botanical layers. To utilize the rheology of grain hardness as a predictor for the flour that can be milled from various wheats, there is a need to first characterize the information that can be recovered about the mechanical strengths of the internal botanical layers from the morphology of an aCRP. This is the goal and focus of this article. From this perspective, the SKCS 4100 device can be viewed as playing the role of a grain hardness rheometer. Independent motivation identifying a need for an explicit characterization of the rheology of grain hardness is the increasing list of publications exploring and exploiting various features of aCRPs as predictor of key aspects of end-product quality. The results of such publications are briefly reviewed to highlight the growing importance of grain hardness rheology in cereal science. In addition, illustrative examples arising from the current deliberations are included. The SKCS rheological characterization of the strengths of the botanical layers in wheat kernels, as explained in this article, will apply more generally to all cereal grains.

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Abbreviations

SKCS:

Single kernel characterisation system

HI:

Hardness index

CRP:

Crush response profile

RPP:

Rheological phenotype phase

L-B:

Lorikeet–Bowerbird

L-L:

Lorikeet–Lang

R-D:

Rosella–Drysdale

M:

Moisture content

W:

Kernel weight

D:

Kernel diameter

SC:

Shell collapse

ER:

Elastic response

EndoR:

Endosperm response

EqP:

Equilibrium position

EndoC:

Endosperm collapse

Eq:

Equilibrium response

SSp:

Shell springback

SR:

Shell response

QTL:

Qualitative trait loci

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Kevin Gale, Frank Békés, Barbara Butow, and Kathy Ruggiero for their valuable advice, Brian Osborne and BRI staff, who performed the SKCS measurements, and to AWB Limited, which provided the wheat grain samples. Many thanks also go to Graingene II for supporting an independent research project on blending that led to the formulation of the concept of computational blending mentioned in this article, and to David Lovell for his careful reading of earlier drafts. The first author wishes to acknowledge support received from the Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied Mathematics (RICAM), where some of the research reported here was accomplished. The first author has benefited from useful discussions with Dr. Paul Wiley of CSIRO Plant Industry. Both authors acknowledge with thanks for the advice received from one of the reviewers which has resulted in a substantially improved paper. Reka Haraszi acknowledges the support of a Bolyai Janos scholarship founded by the Hungarian Academy of Science (2006–2009).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Food Quality Assurance, Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences, University of West Hungary, 15-17 Lucsony str., 9200, Mosonmagyaróvár, Hungary

    R. Haraszi

  2. CSIRO Plant Industry, Black Mountain, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia

    R. Haraszi

  3. CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia

    R. S. Anderssen

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Correspondence to R. S. Anderssen.

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Anderssen, R.S., Haraszi, R. Characterizing and exploiting the rheology of wheat hardness. Eur Food Res Technol 229, 159–174 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00217-009-1037-9

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