Pizza dough makers need wheat flour that meets the Goldilocks standard: it has to be strong, but not too strong, and stretchy, but not too stretchy, to be “just right.”
That’s a tough combination to find in prairie wheat, but the Canadian Wheat Board is promoting varieties of hard red winter wheat that fit the bill. Millers buying the special, low acreage varieties are willing to pay more for it than regular winter wheat because they have discovered it’s just right for pizza dough.
“We need something with low to medium protein and excellent strength, but not so much stretch so that it will shrink back from the edge of the pan,” Rick Czarny of Ellison Milling in Lethbridge said during a wheat board presentation at Manitoba Ag Days in Brandon.
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“This is important because pizza makers will make crusts up to two hours in advance, then chill or retard them, before adding topping and baking.”
The wheat board has established special marketing programs for varieties of winter wheat for which millers have found lucrative niche markets. The millers say the board programs allow them to build a customer base that wants the specific qualities those varieties carry.
“We’re working side by side with the wheat board,” Dale Williamson of Prairie Flour Mills in Elie, Man., said in an interview.
“We’re trying to get more interest in Buteo and McClintock just because of the protein content and the gluten strength and the flour yield and the fact that it’s a whiter flour.”
Winter wheat is grown in scattered patches across Western Canada. The biggest patch is in southern Alberta. However, small amounts are also grown in Saskatchewan and an increasing amount in southern Manitoba.
Williamson said farmers often grow Falcon winter wheat, which isn’t nearly as good for his company’s products as Buteo and McClintock. Falcon has lower gluten strength and provides less yield extraction.
Finding enough supply of the needed varieties has been a problem, but he hopes the wheat board’s programs will encourage farmers to try them.
“If we can get four or 5,000 tonnes a year, that’s probably all we’d need,” Williamson said. “If we could get that to 10,000 tonnes, that’d be great.”
Czarny said his company offers a $5 per tonne premium for the right varieties in the wheat board program as well as trucking from the farm.
He thinks those incentives, as well as the security of having a buyer, should entice growers.
But in return he wants farmers to take his needs seriously.
“We offer a few extra dollars to make sure we get the right quality winter wheat that we’re after. We expect the grower to grow the correct variety and to keep the wheat segregated, properly binned, free of pests and moisture and other contaminants.”
