Miller Magazine Issue: 152 August 2022

81 ARTICLE MILLER / AUGUST 2022 pand. We are then likely to see the structure fall, resulting in low-volume loaves even though the dough rose well. One final effect can be seen on the finished product. If everything goes well during the baking process, the wa- ter absorbed by the damaged starch will be released very slowly, improving the freshness and shelf life of the bread. HOW CAN MILLERS TAKE BETTER COMMAND OF DAMAGED STARCH? It’s easy to see that for the baking industry, the key phrase for damaged starch is “not too much and not too little.” There is an optimal level of starch damage, de- pending on the type of product, as well as the production process, as shown in Figure 3. Functional analyzers exist today to measure damaged starch in flours. These technologies are fully-automated, enzyme-free, and produce reliable starch damage mea- surements in a short testing time period (~10 minutes) with a sample size of just one gram of flour. One example of this type of technology is the CHOPIN Technologies SDmatic, which was developed based on the recognized amperometric method (Medcalf and Gilles). These analyzers help millers guarantee that the flours they are producing are according to the exact specifications of their customers. For the secondary processing industry, it is a cost-effective tool for raw material control and to predict and/or control processing and end-product quality. From a baker’s perspective, being knowledgeable about starch damage and how it can influence their final product will be vital to ensure batch-to-batch consistency of their goods. It is also important to hold their millers ac- countable inquire about whether they are making starch damage control a part of their quality assurance program. Nevertheless, starch damage, like many other aspects in baking, requires balance. If bakers and millers embrace starch damage not as a negative, but simply as a quality variable that can affect the consistency of their dough, our baking methods will only improve for the better. CITATIONS Mühle + Mischfutter, issue 9/2022, p. 15-17. 1. AACCi Method 55-30.01 2. D. G. Medcalf and K. A. Gilles “Determination of Starch damage by Rate of Iodine Absorption.” (1965) Cereal Chem 42:546 – 557.