The moisture and humidity in your industrial oven have an impact on baking times and the quality and consistency of your baked products. A moisture recorder from Reading Thermal would be an excellent investment and will provide a better way to measure humidity in your oven, proofer, dryer and cooling tunnel.
Reading Thermal, a Reading Bakery Systems brand located in Sinking Spring, PA, has manufactured and supported the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System for over 25 years.
This powerful diagnostic tool has become an industry standard for understanding and improving bakery proofing, baking, cooling and freezing processes and for FSMA kill-step validation. Our Digital Humidity Sensor has a breakthrough design that provides a better way to measure internal oven moisture.
Importance of Moisture Profiling
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 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.
Scorpion® 2 Digital Humidity Sensor
The SCORPION® 2 Digital Humidity Sensor measures the absolute moisture content of the thermal environment in both heating and cooling processes. It travels through the oven with your product, yielding a precise profile of the moisture the product experiences.
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.
Bake your products to perfection with a moisture recorder and data logging system from Reading Thermal. Contact us online or call us at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2 for more information.