The Canadian International Grains Institute (CIGI) is blending health benefits with baking. Over the past year, they've been evaluating the performance of food barley when milled with wheat.

Elaine Sopiwnyk, CIGI's director of grain quality, says the reason they were looking into barley milling is because of its health benefits. But because barley is tough to mill due to its endosperm properties, CIGI was looking at ways to mill it with wheat to move the grain through sieves easier.

Sopiwynk says while barley is a nutritious grain, it's not used very innovatively, and by milling barley and wheat together they hope to make a more mainstream option.

"Primarily if you see any barley on the grocery store shelves, you're seeing it in pearl barley or you're seeing it in soups," she says, "really that's the only way we see it in North America. What we were trying to do, is if you can produce those specific barleys into a flour and then that flour could be used in a baked product such as pan bread or bagels... and had that type of innovative concept, you could improve the health benefits of those products compared to when they were made from wheat alone."                    

Elaine sopiwnyk cigi
Elaine Sopiwnyk (right) stands with her colleague, Ashok Sarkar, who also worked on the food barley milling project.

Food barley is rich with beta-glucan, and in Canada, processors are allowed to market health claims on food products that contain one gram of barley beta-glucan per serving as a means of lowering cholesterol levels. Sopiwynk says barley is also linked to preventing certain types of cancer and modulating blood glucose levels.

While this blend of flour would have new health benefits, the baking properties wouldn't change much. Sopiwnyk says there could be a slight difference in colour and the baked product could be denser, although it's nothing too different from whole grain products.

"When you try to bake with barley flour, the dough wants to take on more water when you're preparing the dough because the soluble beta-glucan that's present in there has a strong tendency to absorb water," she says. "We also need to increase the mixing time. So when we're preparing the dough, we might mix it a little bit longer to ensure all the components in the dough are properly hydrated and optimally mixed.

Sopiwnyk says the focus of this project was not focused on the end-use of the flour, but rather to figure out the success of co-milling barley and wheat in a traditional wheat milling operation. Their results showed that up to 40 per cent hulless food barley can be milled with wheat to produce a quality flour with suitable levels of beta-glucan.