Small–scale wheat quality testing for cereals

The physical and chemical characteristics of wheat flour required for products such as bread, biscuits, pastry or cakes are different. Testing wheat quality allows the suitability of the grain for a particular end use to be determined. However, conventional quality assessment of wheat requires a large amount of white flour - which is often not possible in the earlier stages of breeding programmes and can be costly and time consuming.

To address this we developed a method for quality testing that requires just 50g of wheat. AHDB Cereals & Oilseeds commissioned us to carry out this small-scale testing on the 2013 and 2014 wheat harvest in support of their cropping systems platform, which provides growers and agronomists with regional specific information about wheat variety performance.

We carried out tests to assess the protein composition and dough rheology of the 2013 and 2014 wheat harvest. We have shown that our small-scale quality testing method does not compromise on the accuracy of the results and is representative of large-scale tests. While it does not replace larger-scale rheology analysis and test baking, which are appropriate for well characterised applications such as bread, our small-scale method is cost effective, provides much more rapid results and could be beneficial when screening large numbers of relatively small samples.

Contact: Clothilde Baker
+44(0)1386 842287
clothilde.baker@campdenbri.co.uk