Blending soft white wheat with bread wheats
Farm and Ranch June 23, 2011You would normally not use soft white wheat to make loaves of bread because it is a low protein wheat. But that is changing and creating a new opportunity for marketing Pacific Northwest soft white wheat. Washington Grain Commission CEO Tom Mick says there is a sweet spot in blending soft wheat with hard red wheat to produce bread flour. Mick: “We are capitalizing on this phenomenon and we developed a calculator that flour millers can use to determine what would be the right blend. And the bottom line here is that since soft white wheat is normally cheaper than the hard red wheats we can increase a flour mills profits tremendously. We have conducted seminars with individual flour mills in four countries now, El Salvador, Guatemala, Taiwan and Vietnam. The response has been very, very good. The Central American countries we did first and it has been about five months since we did that project. We are already starting to see the results of increased exports of soft white to these countries.” Mick says the blends are running around 20 to 30 percent soft white. Mick: “But in baguettes or French bread we can get as high as 40 or 50%, which will be a real boon for our industry.” Mick says they don’t know why this works, though it is something at the molecular level, and plans some research to find out why there can be an increase in loaf volume by using a blend of soft white. I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on Northwest Aginfo Net.
