Flours, a basic ingredient in the industry for obtaining various food solutions, acquire specific qualities when they are subjected to a heat treatment process, when they are converted into heat-treated flours.
The treatments to which the grains and flours are subjected are specific to obtain heat-treated flours that will be selected by the different companies in the food industry according to their final application.
With the aim of offering the best heat-treated flours, Molendum Ingredients, a subsidiary of the Dacsa Group, works in its R&D&I department with flours of the best quality at source to improve and extend the applications of its products in the final result. Molendum, thanks to its know-how, has developed a range of heat-treated flours that offer different functional characteristics that determine their final application, and which are divided into pre-cooked flours, pre-gelatinised flours and stabilised flours.
Molendum’s pre-cooked heat-treated flours, which are obtained through a light heat treatment that provides functionality in their final application – as in the case of pre-cooked white maize or brown rice flour – make them ideal for baking and confectionery, because they increase the shelf life of the final products and improve their colouring.
Pregelatinised flours, which include heat-treated flours of maize, rice, wheat, rye, spelt, chickpea and pea, both wholemeal, and red lentils, have been subjected to a heat treatment that results in a degree of gelatinisation of the starches, which allows the heat-treated flours to obtain different and variable functionalities for their final application.
In addition, native flours combined with pre-gelatinised flours make it possible to obtain a dough with a higher water retention capacity that allows optimising the existing fat in various preparations, such as milk bread, with cost reductions and sensory improvements.
In the application of heat-treated flours, pre-cooked and pre-gelatinised flours are the perfect ingredients for sizing agents and predusts due to their high viscosity when cold and high binding power, facilitating the production of whipped doughs with greater viscosity, a quality that makes them highly efficient ingredients for the correct suspension of ingredients such as fruit pieces or chocolate chips, preventing these products from sinking, and achieving their homogeneous distribution in the dough.
The correct suspension of ingredients such as pieces of fruit or chocolate chips, avoiding the sinking of these products, and achieving their homogeneous distribution in the dough.
Moreover, this type of heat-treated flours are excellent in baking applications because they eliminate the pre-cooking and cooling stage in choux pastry preparations, thus saving costs and time.
In the case of the use of stabilised heat-treated flours, such as stabilised wheat flour or stabilised maize fibre, a high fibre content is added to the end products, in line with current healthy consumption trends. Stabilisation serves to inactivate certain enzymes that cause the rancidity of wholemeal flours, thereby increasing shelf life and improving characteristics in final applications such as those intended for dietetics and sports nutrition.
