Milling strategies to reduce free asparagine in wheat flours

The control of the free asparagine content in wheat flour represents a suitable approach to mitigate the acrylamide formation in baked foods. This study deals with milling strategies to mitigate the asparagine concentration in wheat flour and most of all in the wholewheat ones. Flours streams from breaks and reductions rolls were collected with bran and short streams and analyzed for ash, protein and asparagine content. Milling streams were studied according to the cumulative ash curve to evaluate the distribution of asparagine and were recombined to obtain flours with different extraction degrees, in accordance with the current regulatory frameworks or commercial flour specifications, and lower levels of asparagine. The present study demonstrated that stream recombination can be a viable milling strategy to reduce asparagine content in wholemeal flours of about 30%in order to limit the acrylamide-forming potential in baked foods in agreement with the European Commission recommendation 2017/2158.