It's All About Bread

2009 has certainly been a year of unexpected changes in many areas Despite a few major potholes in the economy there continued to be many innovations in food ingredients and many new products introduced to take advantage of them. Many of them, from high melt-point “crunchy” chocolate to gluten replacements for baked goods to healthier thickening modifiers, all have one common theme in mind: mouth feel is critical to consumer acceptance.

Among the exciting new developments mentioned at IFT this year were gluten replacements for bread and other baked products. In the work presented below we’ll take a quick look at a gluten free product and compare its properties to three other styles of bread.

Mouth-feel is a complex concept implying a mixture of many physical properties. To properly analyze the complexity of mouth-feel a rigorous science is required. Sensory science has been developed to fulfill this need and is necessary for adequately describing mouth-feel. Sensory science employs trained, human panelists under very controlled conditions to focus on specific sensory attributes of the product in question

Once these sensory attributes are identified and measured however, they can be related to the product’s mechanical properties through Texture Analysis.

Mechanical properties can be easily measured using compression and tensile machines. It is the manipulation of the raw instrument data by software that enables a compression-tensile machine to become a texture analyzer. Let’s look at just four sensory properties and their comparative texture definitions, and then we’ll see how the different types of bread measured up using the two cycle instrumental method of Texture Profile Analysis.