Bread is a staple of many diets, and its quality – or lack thereof – is often immediately apparent to the customers buying and eating it. With many options for buying or even baking your own bread, brands need to ensure their quality control in bread baking is tight so that their product reflects a high standard.
But how do you determine the objective quality of bread, and how do you ensure best practice when in bread testing?
What factors determine the quality of bread?
There are many factors that can determine both the actual and perceived quality of bread.
Actual quality of bread can be determined by analysing the internal and external structure for factors such as cell size and distribution, wall thickness, and slice area. This can help to determine volume of product, oxidation, the likelihood of moisture loss, and more.
Perceived quality of bread can be affected by colour, crust thickness, and indeed anything that suggests the bread may be too dry and crumbly or poorly baked.
Many of these factors can be objectively measured using C-Cell – even crust colour can be analysed using the standardised lab* colour space.
Can baking ingredients be tested?
Many ingredients used in baking can be tested for their own individual quality markers:
- Yeast is a commonly-known essential component of bread baking. Being a microorganism, yeast needs to be proofed to ensure that it’s still alive at point of use so that it gives bread the rise and texture it needs.
- Flour is another vital part of bread baking that works hand-in-hand with yeast. Good quality flour needs the right proteins to achieve the elastic consistency that lends itself to kneading and stretching.
- Salt helps lend flavour to bread and strengthen the gluten present, as well as giving the dough other useful properties. Salt should ideally be tested for impurities and iodine content.
By testing the ingredients and not just the end result as a matter of practice, quality control in bread baking can be assured.
How to test the baking ingredients
Analysing test bakes using C-Cell can illuminate the presence of certain quality markers, such as enzyme levels and the effects of the ingredients in the bread itself. C-Cell can analyse the crumb structure as well as the thickness and texture of the crust, colouration of the bread, and the structure of the cells.
C-Cell is easy to use and operation is as simple as loading the sample and pushing a button.
How to test bread quality (using C-Cell)
Once calibrated, C-Cell is effortless to use. Simply load a slice of bread into the sample tray and close. C-Cell instantly begins its analysis and provides high-quality images to study the physical makeup of your loaded sample.
To learn more about using C-Cell to analyse your test bakes and strengthen quality control in bread baking, see the support pages of our website, or get in touch with us today and we can answer any of your questions.