Oven humidity profiling of industrial ovens with the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System from Reading Thermal can help bakers understand the impact of humidity on their baking process.
Reading Thermal, located in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania, has measured the commercial baking process for over 25 years. We manufacture the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System and Data Logger, a standard in the baking industry that offers you an easy way to monitor actual oven in-process conditions.
Connecting our different smart sensors and sensor arrays to the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System and passing them through the oven with your product enables the system to capture the four main baking parameters: temperature (including the temperature of both the air and the oven belt surface), heat flux (energy transfer), humidity, and airflow (velocity).
How Humidity Affects Your Baked Goods
There are various changes that occur during baking, including time, temperature, and humidity, that affect the quality of your final product.
- 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.
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.
Without humidity, the quality and texture of your products will not turn out as expected. Oven humidity profiling with the state-of-the-art SCORPION® 2 Profiling System from Reading Thermal, will help you improve your proofing, baking, cooling and freezing processes. Contact us online or call us at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2.