A method for predicting baking performance through evaluation of short crust dough

Sammanfattning: The three major components of short-crust cookie dough are flour, sugar, and fat. Since high fat contents have been shown to have a major effect on the development of the gluten network, studying how these ingredients could affect the texture of the dough and the baked product became interesting. In addition, there are no existing methods on short crust cookie dough that allow predicting the characteristics of the baked product based on those of the dough. Therefore, the task was to study whether developing such a method is possible or not. In this paper, the amount of ingredients was varied and textural analyses were run on dough and baked samples. The results were analyzed using chemometrics and statistical tools and different graphs were plotted to visualize the relations between the variables and parameters. The analyses showed that the fat and egg amounts have a significant effect on the texture of the dough in terms of hardness and gumminess. In addition, the hardness of the baked product was shown to be positively correlated with dough hardness and gumminess, which in turn can be controlled by the addition of fat and/or eggs according to requirements on the final product. Thus, prediction of baking performance based on dough characteristics was shown to be possible.