Gelatinization properties of wheat flour as determined by empirical and fundamental rheometric method

Abstract

Certain empirical rheological methods are in extensive use in wheat and/or flour research to assess starch gelatinization and pasting behavior primarily due to easy performance and good correlation with final product quality. However, their applications are often associated with specific drawbacks that could be limiting factors for certain applications, such as poor definition of the measured parameters, time-consuming nature, difficulties in interpretation of results, large sample sizes, etc. The listed shortcomings can be overcome by application of fundamental rheological methods that are based on well-defined rheological parameters such as stress, strain, viscosity and modulus. The objective of this study was to optimize the fundamental rheological method for determination of the gelatinization properties of wheat flour that correspondents to the standard widely accepted empirical rheological method-Amylograph method and to compare them in order to determine whether they can be interchangeable depending on different analytical needs. The obtained results have shown that the application of fundamental rheometric procedure for determination of pasting properties of wheat flour provides reliable determination of the gelatinization properties of wheat flour. Moreover, substantial advantages of fundamental rheometric method over the empirical one were identified including smaller sample size, ability to set the desirable heating and shear rate, shorter test duration and better precision. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.