The role of buckwheat flour in the quality determination of gluten-free starch bread

Overall, the market for gluten-free foods, and thus also for gluten-free breads, grows. About 1% of the world population suffers from celiac disease and cannot consume wheat, rye, or barley based food products. Furthermore, people who suffer from non-celiac gluten sensitivity and an increasing number of people who avoid gluten as a result of their ‘lifestyle choices’ follow a gluten-free or gluten-poor diet. However, gluten-free breads often have poor organoleptic and nutritional quality. They are of low specific loaf volumes, have a dry and crumbly crumb and stale faster than wheat bread. Furthermore, in many instances they lack taste, mouthfeel and an acceptable color. In addition, excluding wheat and other gluten‐containing cereals from the diet creates the risk of shortage of certain essential nutrients. Different ingredients and additives are used to improve the sensory and nutritional quality of gluten-free breads. Many recipes have been developed by ‘trial-and-error’ approaches without fully understanding the impact of individual ingredients or additives on bread quality. In our research, the influence of individual ingredients and additives on different parameters during the complete bread making process, from batter production to bread staling, is investigated using innovative techniques such as baking in an electrical resistance oven and low field proton nuclear magnetic resonance. In this presentation, the use of buckwheat as a gluten-free starch bread ingredient was investigated. Buckwheat is a pseudocereal with good nutritional composition and a high dietary fiber content. The recipe for control starch bread was kept as simple as possible, with only cassava and potato starches, egg white, yeast, sugar, salt and water as ingredients. Substitution of 30% starch-egg white mixture by buckwheat flour changed neither the specific bread volume nor the textural parameters after cooling. Also, buckwheat addition did not alter amylopectin retrogradation enthalpy during six days storage. However, the rate of crumb hardening during storage decreased. Differences in water (re)distribution between both recipes were observed in fresh bread crumb and maintained during storage. Addition of buckwheat flour can thus prolong the shelf-life of gluten-free starch bread. Water distribution appears to play an important role in the mechanism of gluten-free bread staling.status: publishe