Understanding food structuring processes in bakery products for improved formulation and nutrition design

Food structure largely controls the textural and sensory properties of food. Understanding the food structuring processes allows to design food with improved commercial and nutritional quality. In bakery products, structure formation during processing is largely controlled by biopolymers swelling behaviour, melting transition (i.e. starch gelatinization, protein denaturation) and subsequent formation of biopolymer networks.
This lecture demonstrates how hydrogen bonding interactions can quantitatively describe many of these structuring processes including swelling and melting transition of starch and proteins in complex formulations. Taking examples of bakery product applications, it is then shown how the structure formation pathway can be depicted in the supplemented state diagram. The predictions of the formation of protein networks and of starch gelatinization are presented and validated with experimental data, demonstrating the ability to control baking behaviour of cereal matrix from the starting formulation. Insights are also provided on the influence of the hydrogen bonding interactions on gluten structure and dough rheology during baking.
Overall, this lecture shows how key structuring transitions during preparation of bakery products can be largely predicted from physical parameters descriptive of food formulations. The described approaches hold promise for a better and more efficient design of high quality bakery products towards improved nutrition.