Abstract
This study evaluated the refinement of sorghum, corn, and cowpea grains using the processing steps and equipment originally designed for wheat milling that consists of a conventional gradual reduction system. The need to mill these grains resulted from a desire to produce alternative ingredients for developing new fortified blended extruded foods used for food aid programming. Milling of white sorghum grain resulted in a crude protein content of 7.4% (wb) for both whole and coarse-milled flour. The crude protein content in whole fine-milled sorghum was 6.8% (wb), which was significantly lower than that of whole coarse flour at 9.3% (wb). A decrease in the ash content of sorghum flour correlates with the decortication process. However, degermed corn, fine and coarse, had significantly different crude protein content of 6.0 ± 0.2% (wb) and 7.7 ± 0.06% (wb), respectively. Degerming of corn improved the quality of corn flour (fine and coarse) by reducing the crude fat content from 3.3 ± 0.18% (wb) to 1.2 ± 0.02% (wb) and 0.6 ± 0.13% (wb), respectively. This helped increase the starch content from 60.1 ± 0.28% (wb) in raw corn to 74.7 ± 0.93% (wb) and 71.8 ± 0.00% (wb) in degermed fine and coarse corn flour, respectively. Cowpea milling did not produce differences in the milling stream outputs when the crude fat and crude protein were compared. Whole flour from the grains had higher milling yields than decorticated flour. This study demonstrated that a mill dedicated to wheat size reduction can be adapted to refine other grains to high quality.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2024
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.3390/agriengineering6030114
Funding Information
This research was funded by the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) under the Micronu-trient Fortified Food Aid Products Pilot (MFFAPP) program, grant number FFE-621-2012/033-00.
Repository Citation
Joseph, Michael; Alavi, Sajid; Adedeji, Akinbode A.; Zhu, Lijia; Gwirtz, Jeff; and Thiele, Shawn, "Adaptation of Conventional Wheat Flour Mill to Refine Sorghum, Corn, and Cowpea" (2024). Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering Faculty Publications. 254.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/bae_facpub/254
Notes/Citation Information
© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).