As part of a holistic strategy, the potential of climate-smart grain crops - specifically sorghum - is to be identified and subsequently exploited facing the challenge of a sustainable feeding of the growing world population. This is only possible with high-yield and weather-tolerant agricultural raw materials. The focus must be on crops that emit low levels of greenhouse gas while being resilient to heat and drought. This significantly supports Goal 2 of the SDGs: no hunger. In addition to ensuring the food supply in terms of quantity, the aim is to ensure that this food is also nutritionally balanced and thus is a valuable contribution to a healthy diet (SDG 3).
Until now, sorghum has not been used as an ingredient in staple foods in Central European countries. However, sorghum shows a high field yield (up to 9t/ha) and is drought tolerant. Therefore, bundled research activities and cooperation with corporate partners are needed to establish the use of sorghum as a major ingredient in Western diet and to develop sensory accepted and high nutritional food products.
Therefore, the consortia of CLIC aim to functionalize sorghum milling fractions for a successful application and commercialization in staple foods in Europe. Sorghum is already used as a staple food in African and Indian regions. However, the functionality and sensory attributes of wholegrain sorghum products do not meet the cultural European quality expectations. For wheat, rye and in some gluten-free crops the functional potential of milling fractions is well known and established in different products. However, there is still limited understanding of the functional behaviour of different sorghum milling fractions (wholegrain/flour/bran) in bakery and pasta products. It is crucial to investigate the impact of different milling fractions on technological functionality as well as on nutritional and sensory properties. Then we can adapt and control the milling process for producing high quality sorghum fractions. Furthermore, the grain and the milling fractions are functionalized by several approaches such as germination, enzymatic and hydrothermal approaches to optimize and increase the functionality in terms of digestibility and gas holding properties. Thus, sorghum-based gluten-free breads and new 3D printed texturates as well as sorghum-wheat-based breads, fine bakery products and pasta of higher nutritional value and sensory acceptability can be produced from climate-smart grains in Europe.
The CLIC consortium consists of experts in the field of food technology, cereal process engineering with many years of expertise in the field of alternative cereal crops, i.e. University of Hohenheim, BOKU and HTLLMT Wels. Due to the similar effects of climate change on cereal cultivation, Germany and Austria are equally in search of solutions. Through a transnational project, the necessary knowledge can be multiplied, and the corresponding work packages are distributed according to the expertise of the research partners. The project will be coordinated by FEI (Germany) and ecoplus (Austria). The user committee consists of branches along the value chain: milling, additive suppliers, consultants, bakery and pasta production and related associations.