63 Solvent retention capacity testing: What is it, and what can it do for you? Diane Gannon. Nabisco, Toledo, OH.

Understanding a baker’s primary raw material – flour – is essential in assuring his manufacturing processes are optimized, especially in this age of mass production and high speed processing. Solvent Retention Capacity determinations allow deeper knowledge into a flour’s functional components, which cannot be obtained by traditional proximate analysis (moisture, protein, ash). SRC is an outstanding tool for determining “why” a flour functions the way it does in a cookie, cracker, or even a bread system. Knowing why a flour performs a certain way will then allow a miller or baker to modify a specific functional component of the flour, or the recipe utilizing the flour, resulting in improvement of a flour’s performance, dough handling, or finished baked product quality attributes. This modification of the flour may be either through a change in milling techniques, wheat sourcing, or flour treatment. SRC was developed as a research tool, and should be utilized in this manner. It is not a tool to be used routinely in a QC setting, for monitoring hour-by-hour flour production at a mill, but can be used for trouble-shooting in a QC or manufacturing environment where the flour must be analyzed to find out more about the functional components present. The discussions in this paper will address the specifics about performing the test, and how the information can be applied to improving flour quality for specific uses in the baking industry.