Evaluation of dry heat treatment of soft wheat flour for the production of high ratio cakes

An accurate method to heat treat flour samples has been used to quantify the effects of heat treatment on flour functionality. A variety of analytical methods has been used such as oscillatory rheology, rheomixer, solvent retention capacity tests, and Rapid Visco Analysis (RVA) in water and in aqueous solutions of sucrose, lactic acid, and sodium carbonate. This work supports the hypothesis that heat treatment facilitates the swelling of starch granules at elevated temperature. Results furthermore indicated improved swelling ability and increased interactions of flour polymers (in particular arabinoxylans) of heat treated flour at ambient conditions. The significant denaturation of the proteins was indicated by a lack of gluten network formation after severe heat treatments as shown by rheomixer traces. Results of these analyses were used to develop a possible cake flour specification. A method was developed using response surfaces of heat treated flour samples in the RVA using i) water and ii) 50% sucrose solution. This can uniquely characterise the heat treatment a flour sample has received and to establish a cake flour specification. This approach might be useful for the characterisation of processed samples, rather than by baking cakes. Hence, it may no longer be needed to bake a cake after flour heat treatment to assess the suitability of the flour for high ratio cake production, but 2 types of RVA tests suffice.