ABSTRACT
Most savory snacks are produced from dry and/or wet-milled fractions from major cereal grains. The quality of resulting grits, meals, flours, and refined starches is of utmost importance because they influence processing and end-features of processed snacks. This chapter describes dry-milling processes of major cereals wheat, maize (corn), rice, and oats for the production of an array of refined and whole grain products such as rolled oats, meals, and flours. In addition, the wet milling processes for the production of corn, wheat, and rice starches are explained. The dry-milling of wheat, which selectively removes the bran, aleurone, and germ tissues, yields an array of flours with different protein contents (hard, soft, and all-purpose) and recently has manufactured whole grain flours with all nutrients originally present in the kernel. Corn is generally transformed into an array of milled fractions with different particle sizes like flaking grits, regular grits, meal, and flours, which are highly demanded by snack processors. Paddy rice is dehulled and then decorticated and polished in order to produce white rice and broken kernels that are further milled into grits. Oats are usually thermal-treated before dehulling in order to inactivate lipoxygenase and produce stable products. The groats are usually rolled as whole or cut and rolled into small flakes or alternatively roller-milled into meals and flours that are increasingly being used by the industry due to their high fiber and protein contents. The native starches obtained from corn, wheat, and rice are also used for the production of many savory snacks or alternatively modified to suit different applications including the development of reduced-calorie snacks.
