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When the final fields are cut, the trucks empty, the bins full and the combines cleaned out, Kansas wheat farmers breathe a quick sigh of relief that harvest season is complete. But for Kathy Brower, lab manager for Grain Craft’s Innovation and Quality Lab, harvest is just the start of her busy season as she takes samples from those farmers and puts them to the test for how that wheat will perform in making a consistently good loaf of bread.
“Grain Craft leads by example through educating their customers about wheat quality while communicating those needs back to wheat farmers and researchers,” said Aaron Harries, Kansas Wheat vice-president of research and operations, who interviewed Brower for an episode of the organization’s “Wheat’s On Your Mind” podcast. “That dialogue supports the advancement of wheat quality for the entire supply chain.”
Grain Craft is the largest independent flour miller in the United States. The company has longstanding relationships with Kansas Wheat and Kansas State University. So when it came time in 2021 to establish a new laboratory focused on varietal research, there was little doubt an ideal location would be inside the Kansas Wheat Innovation Center on K-State’s north campus. Today, Grain Craft has 12 mills in the United States and the lab in Manhattan does the analysis for quite a few of them, especially for hard wheats destined for the bread industry.
And who better to manage the lab than Brower, the daughter of a fifth-generation wheat farmer and K-State food science graduate with the experience needed to connect the dots between the wheat developed by breeding programs, the varieties planted each year and the final end-use quality of those kernels.
“Having us here at the Kansas Wheat Innovation Center, we can bring in various tour groups, even famous football coaches like Bill Snyder,” Brower said. “I really love making that connection with people. We’ve even had some of the farmers come in and they’ve got to see their specific variety baked out in our process. It’s a tremendous opportunity to put those connections together.”
While the lab’s work is never truly complete, their new crop testing starts as soon as producers begin wheat harvest. In mid-June, a company courier starts collecting samples from throughout the region, which are brought into the lab and tested. Mills, breeding programs and even individual farmers also send in samples. With kernels in hand, testing begins in the Grain Craft laboratory’s milling facility, where kernels are tempered, cleaned, processed and ground.
The resulting flour moves into the company’s flour analysis lab. Grain samples are run through near infrared imaging (NIR), which measures both protein content and initial moisture ash – a common quality factor requested by millers.
“Ash is the mineral left behind after you’ve burned off all the carbohydrates and all the protein,” Brower said. “If you have that outer layer of the kernel, that outer layer contains a lot of mineral content in it. When we’re putting something through the mill – grinding – that part is always going to be present within the flour itself. If we know our ash content, we can get a good idea of how well we’re grinding.”
After initial testing, it is time to make some bread dough. Using a farinograph – a piece of equipment that looks like a miniature mixing bowl with two paddles inside – the flour is mixed with water. The machine then turns the paddles, and the resulting mixture generates torque against those paddles, which measures water absorption and helps determine peak development time.
If dough breaks down after a certain amount of mixing time, it becomes very sticky and very soft and is virtually impossible to remove from the mixer. As a result, the goal of a baking process is to mix the dough to a nice, developed state where it will still retain gas throughout baking.
“From a baker’s standpoint, the baker is wanting to know – how much water can I potentially put into this flour? And then what is the mixability of it? How strong is it going to be? How long am I going to be able to mix it out?” Brower explained. “The farinograph is one piece of equipment that can allow us to give a heads up to those bakeries as well as in our own test baking scenario as to what the performance of that flour is going to be.”
After flour analysis, a sponge and dough process is used to test how the flour will turn into bread. Lab technicians take about 70 percent of the flour and mix it with yeast and water. The mix is put into a three-and-a-half-hour fermentation process, resulting in the “sponge” that can be tested – is it too soft? A little overhydrated? Underhydrated, dry and shaggy? Or just right?
“If you’re running a fermentation process, it gives you a really good look at that initial stability of a flour,” Brower said. “It also gives us a way to judge if we hit the correct absorption.”
After the sponge is tested, it’s time to add back in the remaining 30 percent of the flour, add shortening, sugar and salt and bring that back as a final dough. Then it is time to make a loaf of bread.
In a commercial bakery, loaves are made in an assembly line, not one at a time like at home. In a commercial setting, after bread leaves the mixing bowl, it must go through a sheeting process – a set of rollers that takes out air pockets and makes a smooth sheet of dough – and then divided and molded into individual loaves. This process puts stress on the dough, meaning it needs to be strong enough to maintain its shape and texture. The dough cannot mix and fall apart, or it messes up everything else down the line before it ever gets into an oven. All this to say, it requires high protein quality, not just content, to provide that strength.
“If you’re bulking up for weight training or something similar, you have to have that protein coming in so you can retain your strength,” Brower said. “And it’s very much the same with flour.”
Using a similar process, albeit on a smaller scale, lab technicians divide, sheet and mold the dough into loaves. From there, the dough is put in a pan, goes through a 60-minute proof time and then placed in the oven. Once the loaves are fully baked, they are cooled overnight and evaluated the next morning.
That evaluation includes measuring loaf volume and then slicing the bread to look at the texture of the crumb – important determinants of flour strength and how well it would perform in a commercial setting.
“We are trying to mimic that process as closely as we can because we want to simulate what they would potentially see in their system,” Brower said.
This whole process is repeated with every sample that comes into the lab – about 1,300 samples last year. The lab shares the results with mills as far away as Los Angeles, the Kansas farmers who sent in samples and university breeding programs – like K-State. The participation of wheat breeders is essential, especially since Grain Craft runs a preferred variety program for farmers.
“We couldn’t run a program like a preferred variety program without the cooperation from the breeders,” Brower said. “It’s so important that we have those samples coming in year after year because varieties are changing constantly. If those breeding programs are willing to work with us, it really does help us make decisions for what can go onto that preferred list.”
“It’s very important that those perform well for the farmers. We want to make sure that they have really good yield, quality, drought tolerance and pest resistance and all those things built in that are going to make it so the farmer can actually profit. But we also want to make sure that the quality is going to work out for our bakers.”
Learn more about Brower, the Grain Craft Innovation and Quality Lab and the importance of protein quality in the featured episode of “Wheat’s On Your Mind” podcast at wheatsonyourmind.com.
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Written by Julia Debes for Kansas Wheat