Industrial Bakery Oven Humidity Monitoring

Are you monitoring the humidity inside your industrial bakery oven? Consider the SCORPION® 2 Digital Humidity Sensor from Reading Thermal to improve your products and processes.

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).

Why Humidity Profiling is Important

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 humidity inside the oven can lighten the crust color of baked goods and prevent it from burning.
  • High humidity inside the oven 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 more efficiently transfers heat to products and cooks them more rapidly.
  • The amount of moisture left in a pretzel after baking has an effect on 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.

The SCORPION® 2 Digital Humidity Sensor measures the absolute moisture content of the 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.

Mechanically, the humidity sensor has a high temperature moisture sensor, a low temperature moisture sensor, and a bulk air or dry bulb temperature sensor. In ovens, the humidity sensor can be used to document the relationship between oven moisture and finished product moisture. In Cooling Tunnels, it can be used to monitor dew point temperature to prevent condensation on the product surface.

The humidity in your industrial bakery oven can have a major impact on the quality and consistency of your products. Humidity monitoring with the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System and Digital Humidity Sensor from Reading Thermal can help you bake your products to perfection. Contact us online, or call us at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2 to learn more about our innovative products.