Standards Development

Scope

This International Standard specifies an automatic method of determining, using a SRC-CHOPIN, the solvent retention capacity of common wheat flour (Triticum aestivum L.) produced by industrial milling.

Purpose

The SRC method allows to characterize the three main functional components of wheat flours that greatly impact the dough behaviour during processing (e.g., machinability), baking, as well as final product quality. Viscoelastic glutenins influence dough elasticity and extensibility, damaged starch influences dough stickiness, and the highly water-holding pentosans increase dough viscosity. In cookie-making, for example, a flour’s water absorption should be as low as possible, and, with minimized contributions from pentosans and damaged starch. This fact illustrates that a given water requirement for a flour can have different causes, which can help to explain consequent differences in dough behaviour during mixing, machining, and baking.

The SRC method has been successfully used to evaluate not only soft wheat flours, but also hard winter wheat flours and hard red spring wheat flours. In fact, the SRC method today is accepted for assessing the performance of flours used to produce a wide range of different end products, such as cookies, French bread, pan bread, noodles, and layer cakes.

The SRC method is used both on the upstream side of the industry for marketing, selecting and assessing the different wheat varieties and on the downstream side throughout the baking industries. The SRC-CHOPIN is an automated method, minimizing the operator’s influence on the result, and increasing greatly the precision of the test.