Bake-off crispness

A CRISPY crust is an essential quality of certain breads, but bakers know the crispness can only last so long.  The crust will eventually go soft and leathery after baking. According to DuPont Nutrition & Health, bakers can maintain the shelf life of a crispy crust in bake-off breads for a longer period, using an assembly of ingredients from the company’s collection. Evaluation done by the DuPont sensory panel ensures the crispy crusts satisfy the preferences of consumers the world over. 

Enzymes and emulsifiers

The DuPont™ Danisco^® range of ingredients offers solutions to optimise the crisp shelf life of frozen, par-baked baguettes and rolls after the final baking.  

The POWERBake^® 4000 Bakery Enzyme is a core ingredient in each solution. Crispness can be finely tuned by selecting from a range of emulsifiers, including SOLEC™ SF-D Lecithin and PANODAN^® DATEM A2020, and the hydrocolloid GRINDSTED^® CMC.

“Regional preferences differ on crispness, with consumers having varying expectations of the bite quality, chewing time and texture, for example, when they eat bakery products,” explained Stine Moeller, senior scientist and sensory lab manager at DuPont Nutrition & Health in Braband, Denmark. “The most successful bakers are those who are best able to satisfy these preferences.”

Human senses are the best tool

DuPont draws on its trained panel of sensory experts to make objective evaluations of bake-off crispness. The panel is an essential measuring tool that takes over where laboratory analyses leave off.

“Despite everything that modern technology can offer, human senses are still indispensable to making a meaningful evaluation of the appearance, taste, smell, feel and sound of a food sample,” Stine Moeller explains.

Common frame of reference

Calibration of the panelists prior to each evaluation session establishes a common frame of reference for scoring sensory parameters on a pre-defined scale. This enables DuPont to validate the capacity of ingredient solutions to provide exactly the right kind of crispness for a given market.