Oven Humidity Study

Ignoring the performance of your commercial bakery ovens can be risky. With a digital humidity sensor from Reading Thermal, you can study and improve the oven processes that affect your products.

The experts at Reading Thermal, a Reading Bakery Systems brand, have studied 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 humidity, that affect the quality of your products.

Why Humidity Profiling is Important

Humidity is the amount of water vapor held in the air. As your products bake, they use 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 them 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.
  • After baking, the amount of moisture left in a pretzel affects its shelf life.
  • Some products need to maintain surface condensation to produce a concentrated sugar solution that glazes the surface.
  • The amount of moisture in your finished product can directly affect breakage during packaging.

About the Digital Humidity Sensor

Reading Thermal’s Digital Humidity Sensor provides a better way to measure humidity in your oven, proofer, dryer and cooling tunnel. Its innovative design offers a more accurate and reliable way to measure the absolute moisture content of the thermal environment. The sensor’s proprietary humidity sampling system with patent pending Anti-Saturation Technology™ allows measurements in high temperature and very high dew point processes.

Mechanically, the humidity sensor has a high temperature moisture sensor, a low temperature moisture sensor, and a bulk air or dry bulb temperature sensor. Use it in ovens to document the relationship between oven moisture and finished product moisture. Use it in cooling tunnels to monitor dew point temperature to prevent condensation on the product surface.

Our Digital Humidity Sensor is engineered to be compatible with direct gas-fired (DGF) ovens. Unlike oxygen sensor technology, which can be off by up to 25% due to combustion gases in DGF ovens, the accuracy of the Digital Humidity Sensor remains the same regardless of the oven platform.

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