Without monitoring humidity, the quality and texture of your products will not turn out as expected. Oven data loggers, such as the state-of-the-art SCORPION® 2 Profiling System from Reading Thermal, will help you improve your processes.
Reading Thermal, headquartered in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania, has been studying, measuring, and understanding the commercial baking process for more than 25 years.
Why Humidity Profiling is Important?
Products passing through a thermal process interact with the amount of moisture in the environment. Much of this moisture comes from the products themselves and represents a delicate balance that can affect finished products in many ways. For example:
- High oven humidity can increase the volume of your baked goods.
- High oven humidity can lighten the crust color of baked goods.
- High oven humidity can soften crisp crusts and make crackers lose their crunch.
- Too little humidity in a cracker oven can cause excessive blisters to develop, which burn easily, causing undesirable dark spots.
- Too little moisture in a finished product can directly affect breakage during the packaging process.
- Too little moisture can cause goods that should be soft and moist to overbake and become tough or dry.
- The amount of moisture left in a pretzel after baking affects its shelf life.
- Reducing evaporation can keep the surface of a cookie moist, allowing it to stretch and preventing cracks.
Using quality ingredients and careful handling throughout the various stages of production are not enough to create a quality product unless the temperature and humidity of the oven are carefully monitored and regulated.
Scorpion® 2 Digital Humidity Sensor
The new SCORPION® 2 Digital Humidity Sensor measures the absolute moisture content of the thermal environment in both heating and cooling processes. The sensor travels through the oven with your product, yielding a precise profile of moisture experienced by the product.
This new Digital Humidity Sensor has a breakthrough design that provides a better way to measure humidity in your oven, proofer, dryer and cooling tunnel.
Different types of pluggable sensors are available, including one created for solid or tight mesh conveyors and one for open mesh conveyors.
It 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 sampling system contains patent pending Anti-Saturation Technology™, allowing measurements in very high dew point environments, such as steam injection.
Our Digital Humidity Sensor is compatible with direct gas fired (DGF) ovens. Unlike oxygen sensor technology, which can be off by as much as 25% as a result of combustion gases in DGF ovens, the accuracy of this Digital Humidity Sensor remains the same regardless of the oven platform.
Long bake times and the need to produce the Bake Cycle S-Curve have also led Reading Thermal to design solutions just for the bread and bun baker, including our Pan+Dough Probe™. This dual probe unit is placed under the bread or bun dough and simultaneously captures the pan/dough interface temperature and the dough core temperature.
A copper plate is placed into the pan and remains fixed at the same single point during its entire passage through the oven. The Probe provides accurate repeatable results that cannot be achieved with hand-placed thermocouples.
Reach out to Reading Thermal for more information about oven humidity monitoring and optimization with the SCORPION® 2 Data Logger. Contact us online or call us at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2.