Summary
Maintaining consistent hold times in bakery production sites can be difficult.
The benefits of PELL™ Restrain:
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- Exceptional hold tolerance over hours
- Improved aeration and more-robust crumb
- Increased output
- Less waste
Challenge
For bakeries with large production lines or complex processes, maintaining a consistent and accurate time between mixing and baking can be difficult. As a result of staffing shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the UK’s largest suppliers of high-quality, hand-finished cakes and traybakes to the retail market contacted the technical team at Kudos Blends looking for a baking powder that might help their cakes withstand variations in hold time.
Solution
The technical team recommended PELL™ Restrain, a baking powder that offers exceptional process tolerance due to its unique blend of leavening acids. PELL™ Restrain promotes a small amount of nucleation during the mixing stage (the formation of tiny air bubbles into which further CO2 diffuses during baking) which improves oven spring, leading to greater cake volume. The rest of the gas is held until the product goes into the oven, ensuring the cake batter remains stable during its holding time and improving overall consistency.
Results
Using their on-site test bakery and state-of-the-art analysis suite, the technical team at Kudos Blends were able to replicate the recipe and conditions of the manufacturing site in order to demonstrate the benefit of PELL™ Restrain over other baking powders.
Cake Volumes after Different Hold Times
Fig. 1. Volume measurements for cakes held for different lengths of time at room temperature before baking. Volume indices measured according to AACC Approved Method 10-91.
The bakery results demonstrated that, as hold time is increased, fast-acting baking powders produced gas early on which escaped from the batter during its holding phase, resulting in a rapid loss of volume over time (figure 1). Image analysis, which assesses the size and number of air cells within the finished cakes, showed that any remaining gas bubbles in these cakes readily coalesced (figure 2), leading to large holes and a weaker structure once baked.
Slow-acting baking powders, on the other hand, retained their volume and did not undergo the same degree of bubble coalescence. However, initial volumes were lower.
PELL™ Restrain produced the best results, not only showing minimal volume loss and maintaining a fine crumb structure even after a 4-hour hold time, but also producing cakes with the greatest volume due to the promotion of nucleation during mixing.
Fast-acting baking powder
PELL™ Restrain
0 hrs hold time
4 hrs hold time
0 hrs hold time
4 hrs hold time
Fast-acting baking powder
o hrs hold time 4 hrs hold time
Fast-acting baking powder
PELL™ Restrain
PELL™ Restrain
o hrs hold time 4 hrs hold time
0 hrs hold time
4 hrs hold time
Fig. 2. Crumb structure images of baked cakes. Black regions indicate air cells.
With an extensive range of speciality baking powders and the ability to create custom blends suited to any process or application, Kudos Blends has a leavening solution to meet every need.
Visit www.kudosblends.com for more information.