If you are interested in high temperature and humidity measurement for your commercial bakery oven, look no further than Reading Thermal and the state-of-the-art SCORPION® 2 Profiling System.
Reading Thermal, headquartered in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania, has been focused on measuring and understanding the commercial baking process for more than 25 years. We manufacture and support the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System and Data Logger which has become a standard in the baking industry and provides an easy way to validate your kill step for food safety.
By connecting our different smart sensors and sensor arrays to the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System and passing them through the oven with your product, the measurement system can capture the four main baking parameters: temperature of the environment (including the temperature of both the air and the oven belt surface), heat flux (energy transfer), humidity, and air flow (velocity).
Impact of Temperature and Humidity
Products passing through a thermal process interact with the amount of heat and moisture in the environment.
Oven temperature causes physical and chemical reactions in dough/batter, and temperatures that are too low or too high during baking can lead to changes in fermentation and humidity levels and undesirable changes in surface coloring, texture and flavor.
If you produce bread, artisan bread, rolls, hamburger buns, cakes, biscuits, or other bread products, you know that several stages are temperature-dependent, such as oven-spring, drying/dehydration, and color formation. Too much heat coming from one direction in the oven can cause the bottoms of the loaves to burn before the crusts brown properly.
In the case of humidity, much of the moisture comes from the products themselves and represents a delicate balance that can affect finished products in various ways. For example:
- High oven humidity can lighten the crust color of baked goods.
- High oven humidity can increase the volume of your baked goods.
- High oven humidity can soften crisp crusts and make crackers lose their crunch.
- High oven humidity causes longer baking times because moisture evaporation and gluten coagulation in the crust slows down.
- Too little moisture in a finished product can directly affect breakage during the packaging process.
- Too little moisture can cause goods to overbake and become tough or dry.
- The amount of moisture left in a pretzel after baking will affect its shelf life.
Our State-of-the-Art Temperature and Humidity Sensors
Temperature: Scorpion® 2 Temperature Sensor Array is connected to the SCORPION® 2 Data Logger. It is designed to measure temperature at product level, in fixed positions across the conveyor, and delivers a precise picture of temperatures from side-to-side and end-to-end.
Humidity: The SCORPION® 2 Digital Humidity Sensor is designed to measure the moisture content of the thermal environment in both heating and cooling processes. It is applicable to proofers, ovens, dryers and cooling tunnels. 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.
The innovative SCORPION® 2 Profiling System from Reading Thermal is essential for conducting high temperature and humidity measurement. Contact us online or call us at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2 to explore our state-of-the-art sensors and sensor arrays.