Frozen Dough

Frozen dough allows retail and in-store bakers to offer a wide variety of high quality bread products while saving time, space, and equipment costs. Despite the additional costs for freezing, transportation, and frozen storage, the economics of using frozen dough can be quite attractive, especially when producing freshly baked products of high added value at relatively up-market locations.

Even so, frozen dough must be used with care to fully exploit its advantages. Finished product quality depends largely on the stability of the yeast in the frozen dough (cryoresistance) and quality can deteriorate substantially as frozen storage time increases. However, by choosing the right ingredients and process parameters, excellent bread can be produced from frozen doughs stored up to three months or longer with quality indiscernible from that of bread made from scratch.

The most important objective of a frozen dough manufacturing process is to optimize yeast cryoresistance by reducing fermentation before freezing and simultaneously optimizing dough development during mixing. This can be achieved by careful temperature control throughout the manufacturing process. One important step is to cool ingredients to achieve a specific dough temperature. It is also important to maintain a low dough temperature during final proof. Freezing is another critical step where an balance needs to be struck; freezing needs to be done quickly enough to maintain texture, but slowly enough to optimize yeast cryoresistance. Finally, all the work will go to waste if proper temperature is not maintained during transportation and storage.

Studies have shown that both the freezing process and subsequent frozen storage have significant effects on weight, specific volume, crumb/crust color and texture. Dough weight loss and bread crumb firmness increased with longer storage times. Large temperature fluctuations during frozen storage (-18 +/- 5 °C) and storage at higher temperatures (a combination of -18 °C, -13 °C and -8 °C) resulted in significantly more rapid loss of dough and bread quality than storage at constant and/or colder temperatures.

ThermoBlade can help you achieve the goals of maintaining frozen dough in the right temperature at right time.

Application Diagram with Metal Probes

For high-volume frozen dessert production

Every day, bakers face the challenge of delivering fresh delicious cakes with consistent taste and quality.

Here is how we can help:

Expedite process transfer from R&D to production

Since the ThermoBiscuit™ can travel with the products through chilling lines, spiral freezers and blast freezers providing real time display of air and product core temperatures, it is easy to measure and adjust freezing profiles in R&D and replicate the freezing process across production lines.

Implement quality control

With the help of TC-Probes, the production group can use the ThermoBiscuit to routinely measure key temperatures at consistent locations inside freezers and products, providing documentary proof that the process is on track and quantitative data for quality control.

Speed maintenance

When it's time to check freezer performance, ThermoBiscuit collects accurate multi-channel thermal profiles easily. Real-time data collection and display allows immediate freezer diagnosis or, when used as a data logger, data can be downloaded wirelessly without waiting for the ThermoBiscuit to warm to room temperature. After line maintenance operations, it is easy to run the ThermoBiscuit again to verify freezer performance.

Optimize line efficiency

Many high-volume manufacturers run multiple products on the same line every day. ThermoBiscuit can be set up with the product, in the same stacking configuration inside the freezer, to quickly profile the freezing process temperature distribution during process changeover and ensure the quality control. ThermoBiscuit can be used to quickly find process inefficiencies where product is "over-frozen" and line throughput can be increased yielding more profit without any additional equipment investment.

Monitor product quality during transportation

ThermoBiscuit can be used as a data logger to simply collect temperature history during product transportation. The users can download the data to a local laptop in the destination facility.

Compensate freezer inconsistency

We all know that not every freezer works in the same way. By using ThermoBiscuit to measure product core temperatures at the various stacking locations,the operators do not need to accommodate the freezer inconsistency. Control the process using the product core temperature in stead of freezer’s thermometer readings.

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