Agricultural strategies to reduce dough mixing requirements

The desirability of dough strength as a characteristic of wheat cultivars for bread-making has resulted in breeding programmes targeting strong, well balanced dough properties. This strategy has also resulted in undesirable increases in dough mixing requirements. These increases have created production difficulties for Australian and New Zealand bakeries using the Mechanical Dough Development (MDD) process by increasing the time and energy required to prepare bread doughs as well as increasing the temperature of the dough Consequently, bread throughput is slower, the quality is not always desirable and production costs cannot be reduced. The objective of this research was to determine whether dough mixing requirements (as measured by the Mixograph and MDD laboratory mixer) could be reduced while maintaining dough strength (as measured by the Brabender Extensigraph) and other desirable properties. Although dough mixing requirements and dough strength appear to have similar dependencies on protein composition, it is contended that this relationship or nexus may be addressed by changing the relative proportions of functional protein and protein composition of wheat flour through genetic or agronomic means. Central to this objective were two assumptions: dough strength as measured by the Brabender Extensigraph as resistance to extension (RMAX) is a useful quality attribute in determining the appropriateness of wheat flour for the MDD bread-making process, and that both Mixograph development time (MDT) and MDD work input (BWI/NBWI) are good indicators of the time or energy required to mix a dough to optimum consistency in an MDD bread-making process