Are you monitoring the moisture inside your commercial bakery oven? Consider the SCORPION® 2 Digital Humidity Sensor from Reading Thermal to improve your products and processes.
The experts at Reading Thermal, a Reading Bakery Systems brand, have researched and investigated the commercial baking process for more than 25 years. Our team of heat transfer experts developed the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System and Data Logger, now an industry standard that measures and maps essential baking parameters, such as temperature and humidity, that affect the quality of your products.
Why Monitoring Moisture in Your Oven is Important
Baked products go through three distinct thermal processes:
- The dough is baked after forming to set its structure.
- The product is then dried to a shelf stable point.
- The product is then 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.
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.
Monitoring the humidity in your industrial bakery tunnel ovens and cooling tunnels can take your baking to a whole new level, and the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System and Data Logger from Reading Thermal can help. Contact us online, or call us at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2 for more details about our innovative products.