2-Plants: Non-GE wheat for reduced-fat bread developed

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TITLE:  New Wheat Flour Helps Cut Fat, Keeps Bread Fresh
SOURCE: US Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, by Jan 
Suszkiw
        http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/index.html
DATE:   March 5, 2002

------------------ archive: http://www.gene.ch/genet.html ------------------


New Wheat Flour Helps Cut Fat, Keeps Bread Fresh

Service scientists and cooperators have bred a new kind of durum wheat, 
called "waxy wheat," whose flour may give rise to reduced-fat bread. In 
commercial baking, vegetable oil or other types of fat often are added to 
dough to produce loaves of bread with improved crumb softness, volume and 
texture. Shortening also keeps the bread from becoming stale too quickly 
during storage. But vegetable shortening is high in trans fatty acids and 
can be a costly ingredient to add when millions of loaves are being 
produced, according to chemist Doug Doehlert at the ARS Red River Valley 
Agricultural Research Center in Fargo, N.D.

There, he and North Dakota State University (NDSU) associates show that 
flour from the new waxy durum wheat (WDW) can replace vegetable shortening 
without losing the desired properties the shortening confers to bread. A 
single bread loaf might have two tablespoons of shortening, so replacing 
that with WDW flour would save about 26 grams of fat, or 234 calories. 
Doehlert credits the flour's fat-replacing capacity to a unique type of 
starch that differs from that in most bread wheat cultivars.

Starch is a polymer, or chain, of glucose molecules containing both amylose 
and amylopectin. Amylose is the straight-chain form of this polymer, while 
amylopectin is the branched form. Most wheat cultivars have about 24 
percent amylose and 76 percent amylopectin. But WDW starch is nearly 100 
percent amylopectin.

WDW flour works best as a shortening substitute when it comprises 20 
percent of a dough formulation, according to Doehlert, at the centerÕs 
Cereal Crops Research Unit. In trials, quarter-pound loaves of the 
experimental bread had the same softness, texture and volume as those 
containing 100 percent bread wheat flour and 3.25 grams of shortening. And 
in tests for freshness, the WDW bread stayed much softer than the nonwaxy 
wheat bread after five days of storage.

Doehlert, along with ARS chemist Linda Grant and NDSU associates Monisha 
Bhattacharya, Sofia Erazo-Castrejon and Michael McMullen, have been 
developing, evaluating and testing applications for the new WDW flour for 
about five years. ARS is the U.S. Department of AgricultureÕs chief 
scientific research agency.



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