The use of substitute bakery ingredients and measuring the effect of texture

There is a growing interest in the bakery industry involving the improvement of the nutritional profile of bakery products. One of the most common ways to improve this nutritional profile is by the use of substitute ingredients, including replacements for carbohydrates, proteins, and fats.

Carbohydrates can have a negative influence on the metabolism, and their excess consumption can lead to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay. However, they are responsible for the structure and texture of many bakery products.

The lipid profile of a bakery product might be altered by substitution. For example, saturated fats have a large impact on the incidence of cardiovascular disease. However, there are useful alternatives to traditional oils and butters with large amounts of omega 3 and other components that can mitigate these problems.

By-Products in the Baking and Snack Industries and their Effect on Texture

Food waste and by-products are generated in large quantities in the food industry. 38% of this waste occurs during food processing. It arises from a variety of sources including animal-derived (e.g. hooves, feathers, blood and whey) and vegetable-derived (e.g. peelings, seeds, starch and juice). The disposal of this waste is of detriment to the environment due to its poor biological stability, significant nutritional value and high concentration of organic compounds. The large amount of food waste and its microbial decomposition may cause adverse effect on the environment and human health. At a large cost for waste treatment, it is an additional financial burden on the food manufacturer. Food manufacturing industries have low profit margins and the additional impact of the processing cost of waste is a great disadvantage to the food industry along with the agricultural sector and the country’s economy.

The Volscan Profiler in Food Research

The Volscan Profiler was originally designed for use with bakery products. However, its use has exploded into other industries in the past few years, both food- and non-food-based. Not only is volume critical to bakery products, it is also an important physical property of agricultural products, meat, fish and packaging.

Agricultural products have the characteristic of being ‘low value added’ when compared with other industrial commodities. As a result, the application of state-of-the-art technology to the agricultural sector has been slow; it is only in relatively recent times that various up-to-date techniques have reached the point of practical implementation.

Texture Analysis in Research: 3D Printing in the Bakery Industry

3D printing has made a large impact in many sectors, but its entry into the food industry has not been a simple journey. The first difficulty to overcome is the range of food products that have until now been printable. Additionally, the properties of finished 3D printed products require a large amount of research (texture and rheology as well as colours and general appearance) and development along with the printing conditions to achieve them (such as temperature, speeds and raw materials).

Measuring the Stiffness of Hair

New Hair Stiffness Rig

Analytical technology can help the hair industry substantiate ambitious marketing claims about shampoos and conditioners that claim to leave hair soft and manageable, make hair look more youthful or increase volume. When a hair product is marketed, certain claims are written on the packaging or in adverts with statements regarding its performance and efficacy. These claims must be substantiated with laboratory testing to prevent misleading consumers and going against legislation – manufacturers cannot assert that products have properties they do not have. The test used is determined by the claim being made. E.g. a claim for ‘improved softness’ might be substantiated with a bending test using a newly available Hair Stiffness Rig.

Texture Analysis in Research: Microneedles

Microneedle (MN) arrays are minimally-invasive devices used to penetrate the skin’s outermost layer, the stratum corneum, the principal barrier to topically-applied drugs. They are widely used in a range of applications including cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. Their use involves a simple, cheap, safe, and effective technique requiring minimal training. Microneedles were originally used as a collagen induction therapy for facial scars and skin rejuvenation, and still are, but are also now widely used in the form of patches as a transdermal delivery system for therapeutic drugs and vaccines. 

Texture Analysis in Research: Incorporation of Insects as Ingredients in the Bakery Industry

Back in December 2019, Roberts Bakery in Norwich were the first UK bakery to launch a loaf of bread containing cricket flour. The uptake from other bakeries has been slow in the UK; customers will take some convincing before they overcome their trepidation to eat insects. However, it is likely that insects will become a regular part of our diets in years to come.

Insects such as crickets provide a protein source with a high feed-conversion efficiency rate (an animal's capacity to convert feed into increased body mass). They also require much less water than traditional protein sources such as poultry or cattle. Health benefits of insect consumption include their high antioxidant power and chitinous fibre content, as well as the upside of a higher protein content in whichever food they are added to. The challenge lies in introducing insect protein into the Western diet. This has to begin with ingredient replacement in existing foods, one example of which is bakery products, as these act to familiarise consumers with insect-based food.

Food Texture: Design by 3D printing

The food industry is experiencing a paradigm shift. People’s growing awareness of the food that they consume and the drive for new customized sensory experiences is pushing for the development of new technologies that can satisfy these new consumers’ standards. One of these novel technologies, 3D Printing, has been around for a while, however, only in 2007 was it applied for the first time in the production of food structures.

This technology has attracted a lot of attention for its versatility and potential application in various production sectors, such as aerospace, electronics, architecture, and medicine but it is becoming more apparent that in the food production sector this technology has the potential to be used to create personalised food products, enabling the creation of food products with specific design characteristics, flavours and colours, geometric structures, textures, and nutritional profiles.

Enhancing Textures: An Introduction to the Hydrocolloid Universe

With names like Ultra-Tex 3, Methocel F50, and agar agar, hydrocolloids sound like they’re meant for science fiction novels, not our pantries. However, these seemingly mysterious white powders are incredibly valuable in food development and can provide fun new textural experiences. Derived from natural sources (like seaweed, tapioca, and plant matter), hydrocolloids have been used for centuries to thicken foods and enhance textures. From spherification to stabilisation, hydrocolloids can help you make fancy foams, delicious gummy candies, and intriguing fluid gels.

Confectionery: Texture Geekery

What makes chewy candies so appealing? Texture is a huge part of it. That’s why a lot of professional chefs love making candy—manipulating texture is what chefs do. Professional confectioners, too, are masters of texture, and they’re seriously well schooled in the ingredients that go into our favourite confections.

For every piece of chewy candy, there are a few key elements that dictate texture: Soluble solids control the firmness of a certain product. Gums control the “bite” (supple, snappy, or brittle, for example). And fat and air soften the texture in a way that soluble solids alone cannot. Candies like Starburst, for example, seem hard at first but then yield to your bite. It’s the high concentration of soluble solids that makes them hard; incorporating air and fat, meanwhile, makes the texture soft enough to chew.

Novel Physical Testing Methods using the Texture Analyser

Our probes and fixtures range has developed due to the need for new ways to hold/support and test samples in ways that haven’t been previously available for traditional texture analysis test methods. For example, instead of using the Texture Analyser in an up and down mode you could support the instrument on its side and measure friction in a horizontal plane. This could be for the measurement of frictional properties of packaging or to assess the grating potential of cheese.

Adhesion Testing for Texture Analysis & Materials Testing

What is an adhesion test?

Adhesion is the force that resists the separation of two bodies in contact. An adhesion test measures the adhesive characteristics of a product by measuring the forces to separate the product from the test surface which it comes into contact with. Adhesiveness ('Stickiness') is most commonly measured with a cylinder probe, which is pressed (application of compression), onto the surface of the sample after which the force to pull the probe off it is measured. The higher the force to separate these surfaces, the more adhesive is the product. The distance the probe needs to be pulled away from the product before the two surfaces are separated will also indicate its viscoelastic behaviour, and depending upon the product, its ‘tailing’ or ‘stringiness’ characteristic.

Cutting/Shearing Testing for Texture Analysis and Materials Testing

What is a cutting/shearing test?

In general, any texture analysis test that involves the use of a type of blade to perform the test, is performing a cutting or shearing action on the sample. A number of empirical fixtures feature a single blade or a number of blades which cut/shear through the sample, under specified conditions. The maximum force required and/or the work necessary to achieve this (i.e. the area under the curve) is taken as an index of firmness, toughness or fibrousness of the sample. Whilst empirical or imitative, shearing tests are very popular, particularly for the assessment of food texture and in particular the measurement of ‘bite force’.

The Volscan Profiler in Bakery Research

Loaf volume is of paramount importance to bread quality evaluation. It is a vital aspect of the consumer’s perception of value as in bread and other leavened goods, higher volume for a given weight is invariably associated with a more aerated crumb and superior texture.

For a baker or bread manufacturer, each batch of flour has to be evaluated by test baking to ensure that bread is made to a uniformly high quality. One component of this quality control is measurement of the volume of the bread, which can give information relating to the density of the bread crumb and the strength of the gluten in the flour. This volume information can then be used to modify the dough mix used in bread production to produce bread of the appropriate quality. This procedure is important, not only for the inherent qualities of the bread, but to ensure that the selected dough-piece weight produces a loaf of the correct size for the standard tins used in the baking process.

Fracture/Bending Testing for Texture Analysis and Materials Testing

What is a fracture/bending test?

This type of test can measure the fracture and break strength of hard and brittle products (or their flexibility) by bending the sample, usually until a break occurs. If a break does not occur whilst the sample is flexed then a measure of its flexibility can be performed instead – a degree of flexibility can be desirable or a characteristic to be avoided, depending upon the sample. Stable Micro Systems enables a wide range of tests in this field, using fixtures such as the Three Point Bend Rig which are adaptable to many types of sample, and also specialist attachments like the Crisp Fracture Support Rig or the Spaghetti Flexure Rig.

Use of by-products for agricultural benefit

Crop protection, including weed management, is a critical issue in agriculture. Mulching, which consists of covering the soil surface with organic or inorganic materials, is used to control soil moisture, soil temperature, nutrient loss, salinity, erosion, soil structure, etc. Its benefits for the growth and yield of annual and perennial crops have long been recognised. Although it is an age-old practice for managing weeds, mulching has largely dwindled since the widespread use of herbicides; however, now it is gaining importance in the context of sustainable agriculture. Different mulching materials have been used in different crops in different climatic environments for weed management, and results vary according to the chosen approach, growing practices, conditions and species. These materials include crop residues, non-degradable plastic films, and also biodegradable films. The lifetime of an agricultural mulch varies considerably (i.e., months to years) depending on the nature of the material, its application, its thickness, and the environmental conditions.

Extrusion Testing for Texture Analysis and Materials Testing

What is an extrusion test?

There are generally two types of extrusion test in texture analysis: backward (or back) and forward. Of the various extrusion techniques the one favoured in recent years is back extrusion. The sample is contained in a strong cell with a solid base and an open top. A rod with a disc is then forced down into the container until the food flows up (backwards) through the space between the disc and the container walls which is called the annulus.

How Texture Analysis is progressing the development of even better gluten-free products

The global demand for gluten-free products is expanding and continues to be a significant technological challenge for the bakery industries. One of the principle challenges is producing gluten-free baked goods and pasta with similar textural quality to the gluten-loaded counterparts.

The market demand of gluten-free (GF) baked goods and pasta is expanding. Despite the health halo associated with GF food category, commercially available GF cereal-based foods are often characterised by lower nutritional quality than their gluten-containing counterparts, having lower dietary fibre, protein and resistant starch (RS) contents, along with enhanced starch digestion rates and extents.

Tensile Testing for Texture Analysis and Materials Testing

What is a tensile test?

A tensile test pulls or stretches a sample and as a result the extensibility/elongation and tensile strength properties are measured in terms of force required to stretch and distance something can be stretched to.

The ultimate tensile strength of a material is defined as the maximum attainable load, acting on a specimen in a tensile test, divided by the original cross-sectional area of the specimen.

A conventional tensile test assumes that the sample fractures almost instantaneously in a plane that is approximately perpendicular to the plane of the applied tension. The maximum force is the tensile strength of the material.

Compression Testing for Texture Analysis and Materials Testing

What is a compression test?

A compression test is perhaps the most simple and popular test of instrumental texture measurement. In its simplest method, a sample is placed on a flat base/surface and a flat probe/platen is lowered onto the sample to a given force or distance (or the sample is compressed to a percentage of its original height). The sample is deformed and the extent of the deformation and/or the resistance offered by the sample is recorded. Simple compression tests are often termed uniaxial compression which means that the sample is compressed in one direction and is unrestrained in the other two. Either a low or high degree of compression can be chosen but a high degree of compression will usually cause the product to rupture, spread, fracture, or break into pieces.