Analysis and guidelines of the baking process from ancient grains flour

Ancient wheats have been introduced back in the bread-making process for their health and nutritional properties. Their cultivation was abandoned for more protein cultivars, which show higher yields and they are easier to process. Contrarily, the flours from ancient wheats have low technological indexes. Hence, they have low attitude to the bread-making and, therefore they require the development of suitable processing protocols. In this job some steps of the process of bread-making have been analyzed with the purpose to furnish some operational guidelines to produce bakery products with flours of ancient wheats. The process of bread-making have three main steps: mixing of the ingredients (kneading phase), leavened and baking. This study has been carried on with the objective to characterize with the ancient variety, three of the most diffused kneaders: spiral, fork and plunging arms, at 4 different mixing times in 3 replicates, following a standard recipe. All the kneaders have made to record an increase of temperature. At the alveographics tests the fork kneader showed higher values of index of strength (W), higher index of swelling, and higher relationship between tenacity and extensibility. The physical measures have shown the greatest values after 23 min for the spiral, after 36 min for the plunging arms and after 55 min for the fork. Thus, fork kneader produce a dough with higher W value than the others, and produces the more strength dough from the weak flour. On the other hand, the fork kneader was the mixer required the longest process time.