Making Starch from Wheat Flour

Excerpts from the Introduction: More than a year ago it became apparent that a shortage of corn was developing on the cash market. The importance of such a shortage to the starch industry is obvious when we consider that about 98 percent of the starch normally produced in the United States is obtained from corn by the wet-milling process. At the same time that this shortage of corn was looming on the horizon, the demands were increasing for starch and its conversion products—sirups and sugars. These products were being used more and more both in food and in essential industries. This combination of a threatened shortage of corn and increased demand for starch products led to interest in the possibilities of using other cereal grains besides corn as raw materials for starch production. Subsequent studies at the Northern Regional Research Laboratory have led to the development of two processes for the production of starch, using wheat flour as raw material. In these studies emphasis was placed on the development of procedures that would require a minimum of equipment or that would be adaptable to existing plant facilities.