How Does the OU Certify Flour as Yoshon Throughout the Winter?

Shailah of the Week by Rabbi Zvi Nussbaum

Rabbinic Coordinator, Kosher Hotline Administrator for the Orthodox Union

Some flour mills process exclusively winter wheat. These mills are relatively easy to certify. All that is necessary is to ensure that the enrichments and barley malt added to the flour are yoshon all year round.

Mills that mill spring wheat are more difficult to certify. Such mills will typically hold off from purchasing the new crop of spring wheat for as long as possible, allowing for continued yoshon milling through September, but eventually they will receive shipments of chodosh. In this scenario, silos of yoshon flour are certified as yoshon before any chodosh enters the plant.

Once a mill is “contaminated” with chodosh, it needs to be “cleansed” before returning to yoshon production. A wet cleaning is not possible for a mill, because this would cause the flour to gum up and get stuck everywhere. Instead, the cleansing is performed with significant flushes of yoshon flour. The flushes are performed until calculations show that no detectable level of chodosh is present in the mill.

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OU Kosher

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The OU (Orthodox Union) Kosher is the world’s largest and most widely recognized kosher certification agency, certifying close to 1,000,000 products produced in over 9,500 plants located in more than 100 countries around the world.

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