With the right amount of moisture in your commercial bakery oven, your products will bake efficiently. The SCORPION® 2 Humidity Sensor from Reading Thermal can help you achieve excellent results.
Reading Thermal, headquartered in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania, has been researching, measuring, and understanding the commercial baking process for over 25 years.
We manufacture and support the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System that measures and maps the key baking parameters of temperature, air velocity, heat flux and humidity, and is now a standard in the baking industry.
Importance of Oven Humidity Profiling
Humidity is the amount of water vapor held in the air. As your products bake, they make use of the available moisture inside your oven. Without this humidity, the quality and texture of your products will not turn out as you expected.
The moisture often comes from the product itself and represents a delicate balance that can affect the quality of finished products in many ways. For example:
- High oven humidity can lighten the crust color of baked goods and prevent it from burning.
- High oven humidity can increase the volume of your baked goods by keeping the moisture locked inside instead of evaporating.
- Lower humidity typically results in crustier bread.
- Reducing evaporation can keep the surface of a cookie moist, allowing it to stretch and preventing cracks.
- Humid air transfers heat to products more efficiently, cooking them more rapidly.
- The amount of moisture left in a pretzel after baking can impact its shelf life.
- Some products need to maintain surface condensation to produce a concentrated sugar solution that gives the surface a glaze.
- The amount of moisture in your finished product can directly affect breakage during packaging.
Bakeries worldwide rely on the SCORPION® 2 Humidity Sensor to measure the absolute moisture content of their oven environments in both heating and cooling processes. The sensor travels through the oven with the product, yielding a precise profile of moisture it experiences.
You may be interested in our humidity profiling case study of two ovens for a Reading Thermal client in Germany that was having trouble producing the same quality of pretzels on two different production lines.
If you are experiencing inconsistent product quality, moisture retention, or uneven baking, consider our other state-of-the-art sensors and sensor arrays, such as the SCORPION® 2 Temperature Sensor Array, the SCORPION® 2 Air Velocity Sensor, and the SCORPION® 2 Heat Flux Sensor.
Managing the humidity in your commercial bakery oven can take your baking to a whole new level. Get in touch with Reading Thermal to learn more about the SCORPION® 2 Humidity Sensor and our other innovative products. Contact us online, or call our headquarters in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2.