Quality OF Baking Ingredients

What is Quality Control for Baking Ingredients?

Commercial or high-speed bakeries rely on advanced processing technology and high-quality ingredients to consistently deliver delicious and nutritious baked goods to their customers. Quality control for ingredients and raw materials is an essential part of food safety and quality management systems. These are commonly documented and implemented by industrial food processors and commercial bakeries.

There are many baking ingredients, these include but are not limited to:

? Flour

? Process water

? Yeast

? Granulated, refined sugar

? Liquid sweeteners

? Eggs

? Milk solids

? Salt

? Enzymes

? Dough conditioners

? Hydrocolloids / gums

? Preservatives

How it works

Quality control of ingredients involves eight basic steps:

1. Establishing specifications for each ingredient based on its chemical composition, nature and technological functionality

2. Performing standardized tests and analyzing samples

3. Comparing results against a standard or expected property value

4. Accepting or rejecting a lot or batch of ingredients received at the bakery upon purchasing

5. Communicating results with suppliers

6. Implementing corrective actions to close any gaps regarding the quality of a given material

7. Improving any condition in a given ingredient that might have the potential to negatively affect the quality of the baked goods

8. Recording all out-of-specification incidences for the benefit of monitoring and supplier reviews.

The starting point for the quality control of baking ingredients is the establishment of specifications. They should be properly set by the R&D department and mutually agreed between supplier and bakery in terms related to the use and against reasonable analytical procedures. The QA/QC department should be able to make analytical checks using similar methods to those in the supplier’s laboratory.

Application

Quality control for baking ingredients encompasses:

? Physicochemical parameters related to technological functionality (e.g. solids content, protein content, ash content, moisture content, particle size distribution)

? Microbiological specifications (aerobic mesophilic count, mold count, absence of pathogenic bacteria)

? Maximum or permissible levels of food contaminants (e.g. mycotoxins and heavy metals)

? Rheological tests, both fundamental and empirical (e.g. farinograph, Mixolab, alveograph, RVA)

? Specialized tests (e.g. yeast gassing power, fermentable solids, enzyme level/activity)

In an ideal world a bakery would make each product with exactly the same quality characteristics, and this would satisfy customers 100% of the time. However, in the real world, bakers know that their products will have some slight variations in the production process. Bakery managers and plant staff should measure these variations and exert control over them in such a way that the consumers do not notice big variations in product quality.

Food Safety

Quality control of ingredients is the first line of defense against inherent process and ingredient variability. Generally speaking, customer complaints normally can be classified into the following categories:

? Foreign material in the finished product. This could be anything from dirt, whole wheat dough in a white pan bread, sesame seeds in a product that should not contain them, pieces of cloth, brittle plastic, glass, metal, etc. In summary, the product contains something that does not belong there.

? Violation of label declarations. This happens if a product is underweight, contains an undeclared allergen, or does not comply with labeled amounts of sodium, fat, or trans-fat.

? Shelf life issues. This could be due to the presence of mold or undesirable change in texture as in the case of stale bread.

? Off-flavors or off-aromas. This could be due to undesirable enzymatic activity or microorganisms.

? Poor product quality. This could involve breakdown of icings, melting of chocolate enrobing, bread with low volume, cakes with too open grain and tunneling, texture problems, color problems, symmetry problems.

? Physically damaged product. Smashed, leaking, change of appearance.

How often a given ingredient is tested or analyzed should be based on how critical the raw material is or how important it is for keeping product quality. For example, wheat flour and yeast should have specific quality control schedules and procedures to always have the best materials for bread and cakes production

Clean label

The clean label trend is forcing bakers to replace traditional dough conditioners with functional enzymes which can provide similar functionality and dough/batter processability. In this case, enzymes become a critical and key ingredient that ensures the quality characteristics expected by customers. In such scenarios it would be reasonable to implement testing methods to assess enzymatic activity of amylases, oxidases, lipases and xylanases.

What is Flour Quality?

Flour quality encompasses all measurable or quantifiable parameters that are related to wheat or any cereal flour used to produce baked goods, snacks and many other products. In the baking industry, flour quality is evaluated on a daily basis, both at laboratory and production line level.

Parameters that are used to determine flour quality include:

? Physicochemical characteristics: protein content, wet gluten content, ash content as indicator of extraction rate, moisture level, enzymatic activity, particle size distribution

? Empirical rheological properties: mixing stability, resistance to deformation forces, elasticity, extensibility, optimum water absorption

? Microbiological indicators

? Presence/absence of chemical hazards, such as heavy metals or mycotoxins

How it works

Wheat flour is unique in its ability to form a viscoelastic and cohesive mass when mixed with water, and hold the gas produced by yeast during dough proofing and baking. This is attributable to the protein content and, even more importantly, to the specific protein composition, being a combination of the gluten storage proteins gliadin and glutenin.

Flour quality of wheat related to breadmaking performance is usually determined by four major factors:

1. Protein content (quantitative factor): Protein quantity in the wheat kernel is mainly dependent on cultivar, soil type, soil nutrients supplementation, and crop growth conditions (e.g. climate conditions).

2. Composition of gluten-forming proteins (glutenins-to-gliadins ratio): Upon hydration, gliadins behave as a very extensible material, almost a viscous liquid, while glutenins as a cohesive solid. Although both influence gluten behavior, it is the larger polymeric glutenins that wield the greater influence on gluten quality.

3. Molecular size distribution of glutenins: High-molecular-weight (HMW) glutenin subunits have a major role in dough rheology and gluten strength.

4. Amount and location of cysteine residues of gluten-forming proteins that contain thiol groups (i.e. oxidation potential).

Little can be done at the bakery level regarding the first three factors listed above, as they mainly depend on nature and cereal genetics. However, bakers do have a chance to alter the oxidation potential of flour. This is of vital importance when using low-quality flours with somewhat weak gluten-forming proteins.

Bread’s porous and aerated structure is mainly due to the gluten in wheat. Gluten gives dough its unique viscoelastic nature that is able to retain gases and allow pizza dough to be stretched. It is important to recognize that the structure of gluten is held together by sulfur-to-sulfur bonds (S-S) created by cysteine residues. Without enough sulfur and disulfide bonds, bread has a very low gas retention capacity, resulting in something more like a brick than a light finished product.

Application

Flour quality in the baking industry is often related to the breadmaking performance or baking potential of wheat flour. In such cases, flour quality is expressed in terms of product volume and crumb grain structure. ‘High quality’ flours intended for bread production often yield the highest specific volumes with standard formulations.

What defines flour quality for a baker is highly variable and subjective, and related to the desired end product. What can be universally said about flour quality is that it needs to be consistent throughout time.

From the bakers’ perspective, their first desire is for the flour they purchase to show consistent and predictable baking performance at production line level. Flour with a high degree of variability in performance results in variability in product quality as well as time, money and waste spent making adjustments.

The quality of flour intended for bread production can be modified and improved by using dough conditioners and enzymes. Amylases and oxidizing agents are the most frequently used flour improvers used