Shredded Wheat (and other breakfast cereals)

Whole grain, almost exclusively wheat, is traditionally used for making shredded cereal biscuits. Unlike flakes, this process starts by cooking the cleaned, whole wheat in water with no other ingredients added. The finished moisture content will be significantly higher than wheat cooked for flaking - about 50%.

After cooking, the grain is cooled and placed in holding bins for tempering. In this case, tempering does more than simply equilibrate moisture within both the batch and individual kernels. The process allows the cooked wheat kernels to become firmer, making subsequent processing easier.

As with flaking, shredding itself is achieved by passing the tempered grain between two rolls. These rolls, however, are much smaller than flaking rolls and one roll will contain grooves to yield the web of shredded grain. One pair of rolls will produce one layer of the shredded grain biscuit. Full-size biscuits require around fifteen or more pairs for enough shred layers.

Once enough shred webs are layered, the mass passes through a cutter. This device's edges are not sharp enough to actually cut, but compress the web into individual biscuits that are joined together. The biscuits then pass through a band-oven for baking down to a moisture below 5%.

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GoalGetter said:

You know - for those who have always wondered...

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