To bake your products to perfection, measure and control oven humidity with the innovative SCORPION® 2 Profiling System from Reading Thermal which can help you achieve excellent results.
Located in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania, Reading Thermal has focused on measuring and understanding the commercial baking process for over 25 years. We manufacture the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System and Data Logger, which is a standard in the baking industry and offers you an easy way to monitor actual oven in-process conditions.
Connecting our different smart sensors and sensor arrays to the SCORPION® 2 Data Logger and passing them through the oven with your product enables the system to capture the four main baking parameters: temperature (including the temperature of both the air and the oven belt surface), heat flux (energy transfer), humidity, and airflow (velocity).
How Humidity Affects Your Products
Baked products go through three distinct thermal processes:
- The dough is baked after forming to set its structure.
- The product must then be dried to a shelf stable point.
- The product must be adequately cooled before packaging or storage to prevent moisture condensation.
The changes during baking that affect the quality of the final product include time, temperature, and humidity.
- The amount of moisture that remains in a product can affect its shelf life.
- Limiting evaporation can keep the surface of the product moist, allowing it to stretch and preventing cracks.
- Low humidity in a cracker oven can cause blisters that lead to undesirable dark spots and excessive breakage. It may also give the cracker a burnt taste.
- The lack of humidity in a cookie oven can prevent internal moisture from escaping which can lead to checking (the spontaneous cracking of the cookie after baking).
- High humidity in bread ovens produces the desirable glossy crust seen on many bread products. Steam injection is often used to achieve this type of crust.
- High humidity will help kill pathogens, like salmonella, that can be found in surface toppings.
- Product throughput can also be affected by when and how much moisture builds in a process. Moisture laden environments reduce baking efficiency, thereby reducing product throughput.
Digital Humidity Sensor Advantages
Reading Thermal’s new Digital Humidity Sensor provides a better way to measure humidity in your oven, proofer, dryer and cooling tunnel.
The breakthrough design provides a more accurate and reliable way to measure the absolute moisture content of the thermal environment. The sensor contains a proprietary humidity sampling system with patent pending Anti-Saturation Technology™ that allows measurements in high temperature and very high dew point processes.
Products passing through industrial ovens interact with the amount of moisture in the environment. When you measure and control oven humidity with the Reading Thermal Digital Humidity Sensor, you will gather the vital information you need to understand and improve the processes that affect your baked goods. Contact us online, or call us at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2 for more information.