Without humidity, the quality and texture of your products will not turn out as you expect. Find out why humidity profiling is important in commercial baking processes and how the state-of-the-art SCORPION® 2 Profiling System and Data Logger from Reading Thermal can help.
Located in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania, Reading Thermal has focused on measuring and understanding the commercial baking process for over 25 years. We manufacture the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System, a standard in the baking industry, and offer you an easy way to monitor actual oven in-process conditions.
How Humidity Affects Your Products
- The moisture remaining in a product can affect its shelf life.
- Keeping the surface of a product moist by limiting evaporation allows it to stretch and prevents cracks.
- Too little humidity in a cracker oven can cause blisters that lead to dark spots and excessive breakage. Your crackers may also have a burnt taste.
- Too little humidity in a cookie oven can stop internal moisture from escaping, leading to cracking of the cookie after baking.
- High humidity in a bread oven produces the desirable glossy crust seen on many 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.
- 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 products, yielding a precise profile of the moisture they experience.
Our new Digital Humidity Sensor has a breakthrough design that gives bakers a better way to measure humidity in the 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.
A proprietary humidity sampling system with patent pending Anti-Saturation Technology™ allows measurements in high temperature and very high dew point processes, 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 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, such as 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.
If you are experiencing inconsistent product quality in your commercial baking processes and wonder why this is happening, humidity profiling with Reading Thermal’s Scorpion® 2 Digital Humidity Sensor is important and will give you a precise picture of what is happening inside your oven. Call us at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2, or contact us online to learn more about our state-of-the-art products.