Rye-derived wheat cultivars are being used in many breeding programmes throughout the world in order to achieve improvements in yield and disease resistance. However, the serious quality defect of intense dough stickiness associated with many of these wheat cultivars is limiting the usefulness of their flour in large mechanised bread bakeries. A dough preparation procedure was developed which enabled the dough surface properties of a range of rye-derived wheat cultivars to be assessed on doughs mixed quantitatively to their optimum mixing time. Intense dough stickiness was found in samples of 1AL/1RS and 1DL/1RS translocation lines tested and in all of the 1BL/1RS wheat cultivars examined except the West German cultivar, Disponent. Most of the 1BL/1RS wheat cultivars were derived from the Russian cultivars, Kavkaz, Aurora and Skorospelka 35 and included the CIMMYT-bred cultivars such as the Veery lines (Glennson, Ures, Genaro and Seri) and the Nebraskan cultivar, Siouxland. Based on the results of studying selected 1BL/1RS wheat cultivars in detail, this intense dough stickiness appeared to be independent of growing season, trial location, protein content, mixing tolerance, milling process and extraction rate. In addition pilot bakery trials confirmed that our laboratory testing procedures can be used to detect this intense dough stickiness.
