Editor’s note: Idaho wheat checkoff dollars support the work of U.S. Wheat Associates (USW), the export market development organization for the U.S. wheat industry. USW promotes the reliability, quality, and value of all six U.S. wheat classes to wheat buyers, millers, bakers, food processors and government officials in more than 100 countries around the world.
There is an easily understood expression in English that “you cannot judge a book by its cover.” Applied to the recently harvested 2021/22 U.S. soft white wheat crop that is good advice for the world’s flour millers and wheat food producers.
The persistent Pacific Northwest (PNW) drought resulted in significantly lower yields and pushed 2021/22 average SW protein levels to 11.3 percent, compared to the five-year average of 9.7 percent. As a rule, low protein SW is desirable for many end-use products. As USW Bakery Consultant Roy Chung says, however, protein level alone does not say everything about soft white end-quality performance.
Instead, USW is helping flour millers learn that testing for Solvent Retention Capacity (SRC) is the most effective and valuable method for predicting the true performance characteristics of flour for biscuits (cookies) and crackers.
The SRC method, approved by the American Association of Cereal Chemists, examines the characteristics of glutenin, gliadin and arabinoxylan and the level of starch damage in flour. These values describe the flour’s ability to absorb water during the mixing process and its ability to retain or release that water during and after the baking process, among several other performance characteristics.
The combined pattern of the four component SRC values establishes a practical flour quality profile useful for predicting functionality, giving the miller and baker a ‘fingerprint’ of U.S. soft white (SW) and soft red winter (SRW) wheat flour end-quality performance.
