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From Field to Flour

Much like baking, the process of turning wheat into flour combines both art and science.

Build you knowledge of baking ingredients, production techniques and best practices through these articles, developed to help you achieve better performance in your baking applications.

You know flour comes from wheat – but do you know how those amber waves of grain actually become that creamy white powder you find yourself up to your elbows in every day?

Unlike other types of grain processing, making wheat flour is a complex process that involves a lot more than grinding up the latest crop of kernels. In fact, the milling itself plays a relatively minor role in the whole effort. Far more important to creating a quality flour are factors like where the wheat is grown and how different wheat crops are blended together.

Because wheat is affected so heavily by climate, the characteristics of each crop can vary substantially from season to season. The same wheat variety, grown in the same field, may produce far different flour this year than last. And within any given year, wheat from one area may be vastly different than wheat from another, due to regional variations in sun, wind, rain and soil. Given these ever-changing variables, how does Progressive Baker produce flours that maintain a level of consistency from year to year? By taking our tech team to the fields, for starters.

As the growing season gets underway, our crop evaluators visit wheat fields across the grain belt to get a sense for the size and shape of the current crop and the potential impact weather conditions may have on the quality attributes of the wheat. But it's at harvest time when the real work kicks in. Beginning in May, when the first winter wheat ripens in Texas, Progressive Baker people follow the harvest as it moves north, gathering wheat samples from fields all along the way. By the time they pass through Kansas in June, Nebraska by the Fourth of July, and into South Dakota, Minnesota and Canada for the spring wheat harvests in the fall, the field crew will have gathered between 2000 to 5000 samples, each averaging 4 to 5 pounds.

They send the wheat to Progressive Baker's Bake Lab for analysis, where experts evaluate each sample, making assessments that help us predict milling characteristics that can affect flour quality. Then they grind the wheat into flour and bake with it to test performance qualities such as protein levels, gluten strength, mixing time, processing tolerance and water absorption.

It all adds up to hundreds of hours of work, but the information this extensive surveying provides is invaluable. Results are compiled in a database, which allows us to assess the wheat by geography to get a better understanding of the year's overall crop. We can determine where the largest concentrations of wheat with the best attributes are located – knowledge that lets us determine the performance characteristics we can expect to achieve in our flour. Comparing what's possible with what our customers ideally want, we make decisions on how best to blend wheat from different areas to create flours that deliver the performance you're looking for.

The blending process changes each year, in response to the changing attributes of the crop. In that sense, it mimics bread baking, where you often also must adjust processes to compensate for environmental variations. And like baking, the combination of knowledge and intuition that skilled wheat blending requires makes it as much an art as a science. The science lies in gathering as much data as possible to predict how the wheat will perform. The art comes in balancing the ever-changing variables to blend the best wheat.

In the hands of our experienced professionals, the blending process can reap synergistic results. Wheat from one location might exhibit exceptional grain and texture, while wheat from another area might exhibit exceptional processing tolerance. Neither wheat, by itself, may deliver the total performance you need, but by blending them we can produce a better flour than either wheat would create alone.

We have mastered both the art and science of wheat milling to bring you Progressive Baker® flours that perform in your full range of baking applications. By monitoring wheat fields from Texas to Canada, we can consistently deliver flours that meet your needs.