Substantiation of the Technology of Processing Wheat Grains Into Wholemeal Flour

Abstract

The article presents and briefly discusses the benefits of consuming wholemeal products, including wholemeal flour. The production technologies of wholemeal flour have been classified, and their advantages and disadvantages analysed. The academic community’s research results are contradictory: researchers disagree about whether recombined wholemeal flour is higher in its biological and nutritional value than ordinary flour or not, nor their findings allow definitely recommending this or that technology of its production as effective. Therefore, it is important to develop a new technology of producing wholemeal flour for flour mills. This technology would incorporate the advantages of existing grinding methods and at the same time minimise their negative impact on the gluten complex quality and the nutrient content. The purpose of the study is to give reasons for the structure of the combined technological scheme of milling and the optimum modes of wholemeal flour production. The properties of industrially produced wholemeal flour samples have been studied. The findings allow concluding that the quality of these flour samples varies greatly. This is due to differences in the manufacturing technologies and the vagueness of the very concept of wholemeal flour, which should be defined by regulations along with quality requirements prescribed. Such parameters as ash content and flour particles size (which directly depend on how well the milling scheme is build up and whether all anatomical particles get into the flour) have a significant effect on the baking performance. The laboratory milling was performed following the principle of 100% grinding of grain. Three variants of the combined technological scheme of milling have been studied. The best baking performance resulted from using four roller systems for the primary grinding of the bran products and two millstone systems for the final milling. This allowed obtaining wholemeal flour with smaller particles: the residue on sieve No. 067 was 1.4%, and the outsiftings from sieve No. 38 were 40%. Using more grinding systems is impractical: it will allow obtaining even finer particles, but milling will become too energy-intensive and material-consuming