Factors affecting dehulling of hairless canary seed (Phalaris canariensis L.)

Background and Objectives

Canary seed is a novel cereal grain that needs dehulling before being used in food applications. This work aimed to develop dehulling quality scoring criteria and study the hullability of Canary seeds. Methods for dehulling Canary seeds were studied using compressed air, impact, and abrasion-type dehulling equipment. A response surface methodology (RSM) was used to design experiments to assess the effect of initial sample weight, heat treatment, tempering, and dehulling time on the dehulling efficiency and groat quality.

Findings

The results suggest that tempering level and starting weight had a significant (p < .0001) positive effect, whereas time and heat treatment had a negative effect on the dehulling efficiency. Compressed air dehulling resulted in reduced broken groats and groat abrasion compared to the impact dehulling conditions studied. An optimized method was used to study the effect of genotype and growing environment on the hullability of four hairless Canary seed varieties grown in two growing years at one location. The milling yield ranged from 57% to 67% and was affected by genotype (p < .0001), growing year (p < .001), and their interaction (p < .001).

Conclusions

The results suggest that breeding programs should consider the dehulling and milling quality of Canary seed. Apart from milling yield, the breeding programs and milling industry should also consider adopting visual assessment of the groat quality using the tool presented in this work.

Significance and Novelty

In this work, a visual assessment tool for Canary seed groat quality is developed that can be used for breeding programs and industry to compare sample performance. Also, our research has provided factors to be considered by the industry when dehulling hairless Canary seeds to maximize milling yield and groat quality.