The Importance of High Quality Ingredients

In food production such as baking, high quality ingredients are essential. They ensure that products meet standards for safety, hygiene and food labelling. But high quality ingredients also help differentiate products in the marketplace, increasing their appeal to consumers. 

For consumers, quality often means the look, feel and smell of a product, as well as its taste. There is a whole perception of freshness that is to do with baked products. 

Consequently, shelf-life is a high priority for bakers, and high quality ingredients can make a significant contribution to this. 

Shelf Life of Products 

There are two key factors in ensuring the shelf-life of baked goods: 

  • Mould-free shelf-life, and 

  • Structural shelf-life. 

To achieve a mould-free shelf life, bakers must ensure that there is no microbial spoilage of their products. This is more to do with quality assurance than food safety. It impacts on customers’ perceptions of products. And it can mean very obvious, visible signs of spoilage. 

With structural shelf-life, the object is to prevent products going stale too soon. 

The means of achieving both mould-free and structural shelf-life come with getting the right balance and quality of ingredients during the baking process. 

You can minimise mould growth by lowering water activity and pH levels. And a lower pH also helps to increase the effectiveness of various preservatives used in baking. 

Shelf-life can also be an issue if a bakery decides to change the formulation of its products, or even if they switch supplier for ingredients. 

This is where process control is essential, and where in-line testing of baked products can ensure consistency and quality of ingredients. 

An effective method for carrying out this type of testing is near infrared analysis (NIR), using an in-line NIR analyser. 

But ensuring the high quality of ingredients also involves other parts of the supply chain, including grain testing before, during and after harvest. 

Maintaining Grain Quality 

Grain quality is essential for the quality of finished baked products. To meet the standards of bakeries and other food production companies, farmers must ensure that they test grain against these essential parameters: 

  • Moisture 

  • Weight 

  • Protein and oil content. 

Different aspects of grain quality will suit different end applications as ingredients. For example, wheat with a specified protein content will be well-suited to milling. 

Again, NIR is an effective method for testing these foodstuffs, and with the latest portable technology, this can happen on-farm.  

This helps ensure quality of ingredients earlier in the supply chain, which makes a difference to the value of farmers’ yields, but also to the food producers using these ingredients. 

Quality Control

Quality control helps ensure that bakeries and other producers have the high quality ingredients they need. 

Baked goods testing is therefore central to how bakeries operate. Well-baked bread requires certain fundamental characteristics, including flavour, crust, elasticity, air and overall finish. 

But well-baked bread will only come from including good ingredients, so it is important to test these too. 

These ingredients include: 

  • Flour 

  • Water 

  • Sugar 

  • Salt 

  • Fat 

  • Leaven. 

And it is not just about their individual quality, but the balance of these ingredients in the baking process. 

The best flour for use in bread baking, for example, is protein-rich. This comes from its glutenin and gliadin content, as well as from globulin, albumin and protease. Gluten in flour helps ensure a cohesive dough, and influences the formation of carbon dioxide during yeast fermentation. 

There is a range of instruments for testing the gluten quality of dough. 

Another aspect of optimising baking involves the use of enzymes. Enzymes are substances which act as catalysts, causing a series of reactions to occur. Used in flour, they can improve its technological properties. They can therefore give bakers a competitive advantage. 

Flour testing involves analysing wheat flour for levels of the alpha amylase enzyme, which helps to break down starches, provide sugars for fermentation and improve bread volume. But levels of it need to be just right. Too much, and the flour will produce stickier doughs. 

Other ingredient characteristics flour testing will identify include levels of protein, fibre, moisture and ash. 

It will also test for the presence of mycotoxins. 

Ingredients testing extends to other areas of food and drink production, such as brewing. 

Brewers need to test the quality of the yeasts they use, as specific strains will give different beers their aromatic qualities, as well as acting to transform sugars into carbon dioxide and alcohol. 

And distillers and brewers also require stringent quality control for barley at maltings. 

It is essential that food producers, growers and manufacturers test their products for the quality of their ingredients. 

For more information about our range of quality testing equipment, please contact us. 

Rachael Smith