DisplayTitle

Soft Wheat Milling and Flour Quality Attributes​

Broadcast Date: October 16, 2025 | 11:30am - 12:30pm Central
Price: FREE for members - Join Now to register! 

Webinar Summary

Understanding wheat classes, their grading, and regional availability is essential to predicting baked product performance because each variety possesses distinct physical and functional traits. Kernel characteristics such as hardness, weight, and extraction efficiency influence how flour behaves during milling and dough formation. Likewise, flour quality attributes—like strength, extensibility, and water absorption—determine texture, volume, and consistency of finished products. Together, these factors shape everything from cookie spread to bread rise, making their study crucial for producing baked goods with targeted qualities.

Learning Objectives

• Participants will learn of the different types of wheat classes, grading system and regional availability.
• They will gain understanding of kernel characteristics like kernel hardness, kernel weight, milling quality and extraction.
• Flour quality attributes of strength, extensibility, water absorption, will be discussed in relation to their impact on baked product performance.
• Soft wheat flour quality tests will be discussed (Farinograph, Glutomatic, Alveograph and Solvent Retention Capacity).
• Participants will learn how the tests relate to commercial process performance and how the results relate to finished product performance (texture, color, geometry).

Webinar Presenters

 

Teepakorn Kongraksawech (TK)

Senior Research Associate, Oregon State University

Dr. Teepakorn Kongraksawech (TK) is a Senior Research Associate I in the Department of Crop and Soil Science at Oregon State University (OSU), where he manages the OSU Cereal Quality Laboratories. He earned his Ph.D. in Food Science from OSU and brings extensive expertise in cereal chemistry, grain and flour quality evaluation, and functionality testing. His research supports OSU’s wheat breeding and cereal research programs, generating critical data that has contributed to the release of more than a dozen wheat cultivars. Beyond research, Dr. TK co- teaches Food Systems Chemistry and mentors undergraduate and graduate students, helping prepare the next generation of scientists.

 

Aimee Hill

Director of the Baking Innovation Lab, Hartwick College

Aimee Hill is the Director of the Baking Innovation Lab (BIL), through the Center for Craft Food & Beverage (CCFB), Hartwick College in downtown Oneonta. Her work is focused on building new partnerships and collaborations with local growers, millers and bakers and supporting the development and utilization of well-adapted, regional grains and cereals. Aimee’s background, by training and interest, is in education, food, farming, fermentation and soil, biochemistry and microbiology. She has an ongoing interest in resilient local agriculture production and agricultural products and in positively contributing toward local use of quality grain and grain products. At the BIL, she provides convenient, affordable and reliable testing, technical support, quality improvement and planning services for small and mid-sized farms, millers, bakers and those interested in grains and cereals. A priority of the BIL is to provide Hartwick students with research and other experiential learning opportunities, and Aimee helps provide these opportunities to students through the BIL research bakery, lab, workshop and production space.