The perfect product requires perfect bakery ingredients, but producing these ingredients requires consistent and accurate monitoring and testing.

Does the perfect bake exist? Yes, but it can’t be a one-off. Bakeries need to find a level of consistency. They can only achieve this through continuous refinement and improvement?

Why? Because baking relies on natural ingredients, and these are subject to external factors. No baker can assume that because one batch of flour has certain properties, the next batch will be identical.

Ingredient and improver suppliers can contribute to the process positively by measuring and analysing the materials they supply to bakeries.

What Defines Perfect Bakery Ingredients?

The short answer is that perfect ingredients are those ingredients that enable bakers to achieve the bake they’re looking for.

The fundamentals for baking include:

These ingredients include:

  • Flour

  • Water

  • Sugar

  • Salt

  • Fat

  • Leaven.

But while the individual quality of each of these will influence the overall outcome of a bake, so too will the balance of these ingredients in the bake.

We’d go so far as to say the perfection of a bake is as much in this balance as it is in the ingredients themselves.

Ingredients play a key part in defining the texture of baked goods, as well as their flavour and taste. These texturants include emulsifiers, enzymes, hydrocolloids and speciality carbohydrates.

They help develop volume and crust, regulate water activity and moisture migration, improve fullness and decrease staling. Ensuring a good shelf-life of baked products is an important factor in baking, alongside taste.

How C-Cell Helps Produce the Perfect Baking Ingredients

C-Cell is a baking quality analyser. It measures the structural characteristics of bread and baked goods.

It does this objectively, rather than subjectively, enabling users to evaluate samples based on high-resolution digital imaging and a range of parameters.

C-Cell will measure and analyse:

  • Colour – l*a*b* colour results, internal crumb colour and external depth and crust colour

  • Shape –including concavity, shoulder and bottom roundness and oven spring

  • Softness – texture profile analysis

  • Dimensions – multiple measurements including area, width and optimum packaging dimensions

  • Cell size – holes, cell areas, volumes and wall thickness

  • Elongation – crumb cell elongation measurement, the axis of elongation, level of curvature of the internal crumb structure, and specific degree of circulation.

C-Cell can complete this detailed analysis in just five seconds, recording it through a bread scoring system.

Each sample’s bread score quantifies critical parameters, providing practical and valuable data for refining bakery processes to achieve optimum results.

How Can C-Cell Support Ingredient and Improver Suppliers?

The versatility of C-Cell makes it an ideal testing tool for use throughout the baking process and the supply chain.

Ingredient and improver suppliers can use it to benchmark their products, compare their ingredients with the competition and evaluate the performance of these ingredients.

C-Cell provides objective and scientific analysis, but it enables users to see how ingredients perform and behave in context, contributing to a balanced combination of elements that can create the perfect product.

For more details about C-Cell, please call us on +44 (0) 1925 860 401, email info@bakingqualityanalyser.com or fill in our online contact form.