How Quality of Wheat Grains Impact the Flour?

As we are more occupied with our professional responsibilities, we are paying hardly attention towards our health. Despite having good quality life, people are suffering from diseases. To create awareness among the consumers, the food industry is promoting their product after implementing quality standards. Wheat is our staple food. We use wheat in different forms like Refined flour, all-purpose flour, durum wheat, etc. To get the maximum nutrients out of it, it should be in the highest quality form. Moist wheat grains would give poor quality flour and subsequent products.

Moisture Content Methods for Wheat and Flour

The quantity of water in the product is called its moisture content, it could be either wet or dry. Theoretically, it is the determination of the amount of water in the test material in comparison to the weight of other content. Getting the reliable and accurate results is quite a complicated task.

There are many direct and indirect methods to analyse the moisture content in wheat grains. The association of Agriculture has listed some 35 methods for doing so. The most common method for doing so is heating the grains and comparing the weight of the sample before and after the heating. Presto’s Moisture Analyser works on this principle. It has an in-build scale to measure the weight and a halogen bulb for heating.

The main advantage of implementing direct methods for measuring the moisture is superior precision. But it requires huge and skilled labour and long-time require for analysis. On the other hand, indirect methods are fast but they lack precision and does not comply the testing standards. As there is no scripted definition of ‘dry’, there is no standardised procedure defined for measuring moisture content. And this matters a lot in wheat grains as they are susceptible to the fungus growth.

The inspection conditions largely depend on ambient conditions in which the sample is evaluated. In direct methods, it sometimes become difficult to obtain the repeatability of the results, which produces non-reliable data. Factors like relative humidity, moisture content, performance of oven affect a lot. To overcome all these problems, Presto offers a reliable moisture analyser that gives precise and reliable results in very less time. It is very simple to use the device. The operator just puts the sample inside the device. The halogen bulb initiates the heating and dries the sample. It has an inbuilt scale to measure the weight of the sample before and after heating. As there is minimum human interference during the test, the results are highly accurate and reliable.

Features

• It has a pan to hold the sample – 90mm diameter
• It has an LCD display
• Temperature range 50°C to 200°C
• Output displays Moisture percentage, Dry content, Regain percentage
• RS 232 port for data logging