Avoid producing sub-par baked goods (color, texture, flavor) by using a state-of-the-art moisture data logger from Reading Thermal. Made in the USA, this powerful diagnostic tool, the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System, can help you improve your proofing, baking, cooling, and freezing processes.
Headquartered in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania, Reading Thermal has been a leader in measuring and researching the commercial baking process for nearly three decades.
Why Monitor Moisture in Your Oven?
Baked products go through three distinct thermal processes:
- After forming, the dough is baked to set its structure.
- The product is then dried to a shelf-stable point.
- The product is then appropriately cooled before packaging or storage to prevent moisture condensation.
The changes while baking that affect the quality of your final products include time, temperature, and humidity.
- Moisture can affect the product’s shelf life.
- Controlling evaporation can keep the product’s surface moist, allowing it to stretch without cracking.
- In a cracker oven, low humidity can cause blisters that result in undesirable dark spots and excessive breakage. It may also impart a burnt taste to the cracker.
- Too little humidity in a cookie oven can prevent internal moisture from escaping, leading to cracking after baking.
- In bread ovens, high humidity creates the glossy crust you see on many bread products. Steam injection is commonly used to achieve this type of in-demand crust.
- High humidity will help kill pathogens like salmonella, which can be found in surface toppings.
- Product output can also be affected by how much moisture builds in a process and when it occurs. Moisture-filled environments reduce baking efficiency, thereby reducing product throughput.
Best Way to Measure Oven Humidity
The innovative SCORPION® Digital Humidity Sensor gives customers a better way to measure humidity in their ovens, proofers, dryers, and cooling tunnels. The sensor travels through the oven with the product, giving bakers a precise profile of the moisture the product experiences.
Mechanically, the Digital Humidity Sensor includes two inputs for Product Core Temperature Measurement, an Air Temperature sensor, and a proprietary humidity sampling system to measure Dew Point Temperature, Absolute Humidity, and Relative Humidity.
Our breakthrough design delivers a more accurate and reliable measurement of the absolute moisture content of the thermal environment. The sensor offers a proprietary humidity sampling system with patent-pending Anti-Saturation Technology™, allowing measurements in high temperature and very high dew point processes.
We engineered the Digital Humidity Sensor to be compatible with DGF ovens. Unlike oxygen sensor technology, which can be off by up to 25% due to combustion gases, the Digital Humidity Sensor’s accuracy remains the same regardless of the oven platform.
For inspiration, we encourage you to review our humidity profiling case study of two ovens for a Reading Thermal client in Germany who had trouble producing the same quality of pretzels on two different production lines.
To achieve products that bake to perfection, never overlook the performance of your commercial bakery ovens. Consider the innovative SCORPION® 2 and moisture data logger from Reading Thermal and our other sensors and sensor arrays. Contact us online or call our headquarters in Sinking Spring, PA at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2 to learn more.