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Show Old wheat stores, but taste bores r J r ; tended to be rancid. The bread made from the 17-year-old wheat grain was edible but had a stale flavor. Brennand said wheat stores better as intact kernels than as cracked ground products, since the living grain has some biological protection protec-tion against many of the undesirable changes that occur during storage. However, in this case the grain was not alive. The 17-year-old wheat did not sprout in germination tests. There are great variations in storage life, she said. "We ran the same germination tests on a batch of 15-year-old wheat and found that 84 percent of the grains sprouted. The 17-year-old wheat may have been of poor quality to begin with since it contained many broken grains. There are buckets, barrels and bags of whole wheat flour and whole wheat grains as part of food storage programs throughout Utah. Some of these are of unknown age and quality. The Utah State University Department of Nutrition and Foods Sciences recently tested one such cache of cracked wheat, whole wheat flour and wheat grains that had been stored for 17 years in a basement. According to Charlotte Brennand, Bren-nand, USU Extension foods scientist, scien-tist, the wheat was edible, but its quality had diminished. When compared to new wheat, bread made from the freshly ground old wheat tended to rise less and to produce pro-duce loaves about three-fourths the size of the new wheat bread. She said flavor of the bread from the old stored whole wheat flour Nicole and Sarah Luchty are pictured near some of the midway rides at the Utah State Fair. This attractive Davis County duo earned first place in their age division for the 1990 state fair contest. |