This bread should be a real winner

Posted May 26, 2011 9:32 AM by Michael Bernstein
Related Categories: International Year of Chemistry, Food Chemistry, Agricultural Chemistry

When it came to one subject, Pepper and I were diametrically opposed. Pepper was our wonderful Sheltie. The subject was bread.

As his one doggie snack, we gave him a piece of bread with dinner. No other table food. It didn’t matter if it was whole wheat or white. He gobbled it down. I, on the other hand, go to great lengths to find breads I like, a fact you would know if you read an earlier blog. I have dragged multiple, dense loafs of sourdough home on the plane from San Francisco, carried heavy corn rye on the train from New York back to Washington, D.C., and loaded the backseat of our Sonata with a variety of breads on a recent drive home from Richmond, where they have an excellent bakery.

So you probably can picture the look on my face when I read an item in this week’s ACS Weekly PressPac reporting on something called “sweet wheat.” Sweet!

“Sweet wheat” has the potential for joining that summertime delight among vegetables — sweet corn — as a tasty and healthful part of the diet, the scientific team that developed this mutant form of wheat concludes in a new study. The report appears in the ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Just as sweet corn arose as a mutation in field corn — being discovered and grown by Native American tribes with the Iroquois introducing European settlers to it in 1779 — sweet wheat (SW) originated from mutations in field wheat. Toshiki Nakamura, Tomoya Shimbata and colleagues developed SW from two mutant types of wheat that each lack a different enzyme needed to make starch. Because the new wheat has much more sugar than regular wheat, they called it “sweet wheat.” To see whether the flour from this new wheat could be used as an ingredient in foods, such as breads and cakes, the researchers analyzed its components.

They found that SW flour tasted sweeter and SW seeds and flour contained higher levels of sugars, lipids and dietary fiber than seeds and flours of other wheat varieties. “The specific compositional changes that occurred in SW seed suggest that SW flour may provide health benefits when used as a food ingredient,” say the researchers, noting its high levels of healthful carbohydrates termed fructans.

For more details, go to sweet wheat.

Image: iStock

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