Elwood F. Caldwell, Robert B. Fast, Kent Salisbury, Scott E. Seibert, and Ian Slimmon
Breakfast Cereals and How They are Made, Second Edition
Pages 315-342
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1094/1891127152.008
ISBN: 1-891127-15-2
Abstract
Growth in sales volume—spurred by technological developments, by product acceptability and convenience, and by creative marketing and relentless competition—has resulted in domination of the breakfast cereal market by the ready-to-eat or “cold” cereals discussed in five of the seven preceding chapters of this book (Fast, 1999). This is particularly true in the traditional breakfast-eating countries, such as the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Many consumers in those countries think of breakfast cereals only in terms of the ready-to-eat varieties, to the exclusion of the cook-up or “hot” cereal products that the term originally implied.
However, the latter still constitute a sizable volume of inexpensive and nutritious products, the per capita consumption of which stabilized in the mid-1980s after several decades of decline. Made from one or another of the same five cereal grains (wheat, oats, corn or maize, rice, and barley) as their ready-to-eat descendants, these cereals are the product of an entirely different technology. It typically involves milling in one form or another, many of the details of which are dealt with in other reference books published by the American Association of Cereal Chemists and are beyond the scope of this one. Wheat-, rice-, and corn-based cook-up cereals are typically by-products or fractions resulting from the milling of these grains for other purposes. On the other hand, the milling of oats for human consumption is primarily for breakfast cereals.
Accordingly, in this chapter we deal briefly with all aspects of the manufacture of cook-up or hot cereals and in some detail with the milling of oats for this purpose. Breakfast cereals from other grains are dealt with primarily in terms of the use or adaptation of products of their respective milling processes, with reference to other publications for milling details.
