What if you went clothes shopping, and there were no standard sizes? You might have to paw through racks and run in and out of the dressing room for hours, to find a shirt that fit. Then, after a few days of wearing your new shirt you’d throw it in the wash – but there’d be no standard label identifying whether it’s wool, cotton, silk or synthetic, so you’d likely ruin your new purchase. We take industry and regulatory standards for granted – until we realize what havoc can result when they’re not there.

The milling and baking community, it turns out, has 358 approved methods and standards for everything from how to judge the baking quality of biscuit flour, to how to assess the particle size of flour. But “almost all of them apply to refined flour,” as I learned last week from Art Bettge at a conference called “Whole Grains… the Next Super Food” (the AACCI Milling & Baking Division Spring Technical Conference). Bettge, who worked at the USDA’s Western Wheat Quality Lab for 31 years before starting his own consulting firm, went on to explain that “a big variety of flours are all labeled ‘whole wheat flour’” even though they may have very different properties.

In the world of refined flour, bakers and millers have – over the past century –developed a finely-nuanced vocabulary for communicating with each other about just what kind of flour they need for a particular product, including protein levels, moisture levels, particle size and more. If you run a cracker factory, or make hamburger buns, you don’t just order “flour” and take whatever comes. Instead, you carefully specify your flour, and both buyer and seller can carry out tests to make sure the flour meets that spec.

The world of whole wheat flour is a bit more chaotic, according to Bettge. “We’re at a Tower of Babel now with whole grains. As we transition from all refined flour to a substantial proportion of whole grain flour, whole grain presents widespread challenges to testing. Current methods are simply not adequately adapted to whole grain products.”

Although Bettge didn’t use these exact words, his tone said clearly, “It’s time for us to take whole grains seriously,” and for the milling and baking community to develop the standards and methods needed to support robust and successful growth in whole grain manufacturing.

The old saying that we should walk a mile in someone’s shoes to better understand him or her is a time-honored truth, so I appreciated this opportunity to once again walk in the shoes of some of the nation’s largest millers and bakers. Here are just a few random things I learned in Savannah last week, about the challenges faced by industry experts as they scramble to learn more about whole grains:

• According to Dr. Devin Rose, Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska (we covered some of his cool research in an earlier blog), some wheat varieties make good refined flour and good whole grain flour – but other varieties are really only suited to one or the other.

• Although we know that getting good dough volume in whole wheat breads is a challenge compared to white breads, I was surprised to learn (also from Dr. Rose) that you actually get more dough volume when you add just a little bit of bran to white flour, due to certain enzyme activity. So much to discover…

• Lab mills aren’t designed for whole grain flour. Arnaud Dubat’s company, Chopin Technologies, makes “lab mills” used by industry to create small test batches of flour. (Makes sense; you want to make sure a particular batch of wheat meets your needs before you ask your miller to grind up three railcars full!) But lab mills are designed to produce test batches of refined flour only. Dubat explained his experiments at regrinding different parts of the grain multiple times, in multiple sequences, to use a lab mill for producing whole wheat flour.

Many of the issues discussed were related to the fact that whole wheat flour is a more complex and “alive” product than refined flour, which is more inert. Whole wheat flour has vastly higher levels of enzymes, found largely in the bran layers, which interact with doughs in unexpected ways. 

Whole grain flours also have higher levels of healthy but unstable fats than refined flour, and therefore a shorter shelf life. So the question is, how can we extend the shelf life of whole grains long enough to fit our current sales and distribution system, without adding unwanted chemical additives to the bread? One speaker discussed the problems of a certain whole grain baked product degrading in flavor after 8-9 months, while its refined grain twin kept on ticking.

Maybe we just have to change our attitude about grain products being able to sit on a shelf forever (we all remember stories about decades-old Twinkies), and treat them as something more like produce, fish or meat only with a much longer shelf life. Can’t our system find a way to accommodate a whole grain food that lasts “only” 8 months or 8 weeks, if we can accommodate the 8-day lifespan of a head of lettuce?

And, once you’ve finally managed to create this delicious new whole grain product, what can you call it? My presentation at this conference, on the many conflicting definitions of a whole grain food, pointed out yet another area where there’s still a lot of work to do in nailing down standards.

I was encouraged by the earnest attitude of the largely R&D people attending this conference; they were there because they want to get serious about doing whole grains right. At the same time, though, it was sobering to realize how much farther we need to go before a robust technical infrastructure for whole grain foods exists in the US food industry. We’re a few steps down the path, but with a long way still to go. (Cynthia)