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Milling value and behavior during milling of wheat samples from around the world
A. DUBAT (1), O. Le Brun (1), G. Vericel (1) (1) CHOPIN Technologies, Villeneuve la Garenne, France.

Milling Quality is associated with the extraction rate, which is the maximum amount of flour of a certain quality obtained. It is important as even a low yield gap has significant economic consequences. In the milling industry, it is also useful to know precisely the behavior of wheat during milling. Depending on the characteristics of the grain, most flour may be made during the breaking or reduction stage. Therefore, the industrial mill diagram should be perfectly suited to the type of grain used. The objective of this study is to create a map of the world's wheat quality. 150 wheat samples, coming from 17 countries distributed on the 5 continents, are tempered (16% / 24h) then milled on a laboratory mill (LabMill, Chopin Technologies). LabMill’s milling diagram consists of 6 consecutive steps: 2 breaking steps (to make flour, fine middlings, coarse middlings, and bran), 1 sizing step (to reduce coarse middlings to flour, fine middlings, and fine bran) and 3 reduction steps (to reduce fine middlings to flour). As expected, flour production is highly variable from one sample to other. Not only the global quantity of flour (extraction rate changes from 60% to 77%) varies, but also the distribution among the different milling steps (breaking step produces between 20% and 50% of the total flour, sizing step between 16% and 23% and reduction step between 27% and 64%). Consequently, this study confirms the strong variability of wheat quality and the necessity to have tools to predict and evaluate this quality.