New Crop: Sweet Wheat

Yet another amazing development from the Land of the Rising Sun.

On December 12, researchers from Japan’s National Agriculture
and Food Research Organization (NARO) and Nippon Flour Mills
announced the development of sweet wheat, a hybridized
variety of wheat with twice the sugar concentration of common
wheat.

This first-of-its-kind sweet wheat eliminates the need to add
sugar when it is used in cakes or other baked goods, resear-
chers claim.

By repeatedly breeding varieties of wheat with low levels of
enzymes associated with starch production, the researchers
were able to lower the wheat’s starch content — which is
ordinarily around 70% — to 25%.
The result is a variety of wheat with a significantly higher
concentration of sugars such as maltose and sucrose.

Nippon Flour Mills hopes to make sweet wheat commercially
available in two to three years.


SOURCE:
Pink Tentacle

ADDITIONAL SOURCES:
LiveScience.com
TechNovelgy.com

This is a pretty cool development.

I'm thinking that without needing to add as much sugar
to baking, that maybe foods can be made to be less fatty.

I'd definately like to try some products made with this
Sweet Wheat.


Comments, Opinions?

[edit on 12/18/2006 by iori_komei]

I think i would prefer to use regular wheat, and then add sucralose or another sugar subsitute. This definitly doesn't reduce the calories.

Infact, what is the point? Instead of taking a packet of sugar, the sugar is already in the wheat. So what? Its a neat accomplishment, but is it economical or useful?

Hopefully these kinds of advances will let us do things like have wheat that has most of the vitamins that you need, or that have protein in them, etc.

Stuff that can be grown in famine bound countries and become a real stable for them.

They didn't add anymore surgars than you would find in normal wheat, just reduced the starch content so the sweeter flavor( already there) isn't drwoned out so much. It is better than adding more sugar on top...although I dought it is super sweet or anything.

Originally posted by LordBaskettIV
They didn't add anymore surgars than you would find in normal wheat, just reduced the starch content so the sweeter flavor( already there) isn't drwoned out so much.

Starches are long chains of sugars, so if the plant slows down making starch, the sugars will build up to a higher level.


But I don't really see much use for this either. I think cakes would still need added sugar -- at the very least cake recipes would have to be completely changed to take account for this. And I would think the flour from this wheat would be too sweet for regular breads.

Nothing was said of the protein content which is the most important difference between bread flour and cake flour, so I'm really not even sure if it would really help make better cakes even with updated recipes.