Baking kinetics of laminated dough using convective and microwave heating

Abstract

Microwave baking is gaining popularity due to improved time efficiency of the process as compared to the traditional convective baking. Several studies focused on combining microwave baking with other heating techniques in order to achieve desirable product properties. However, not much is known about the principles of combining these techniques for complex laminated structures like puff pastry. In this work, the independent influence of convection and microwave was studied for baking of puff pastry. Product properties such as moisture content, expansion, texture and color were characterized in order to assess the effect of the heating methods As compared to convection, microwave baking resulted in a much faster process, up to 5 times reduction in baking time, without significant difference in volume and hardness of the pastry. However, it led to a different structure formation in terms of pore size distribution. Browning quality of the product was more desirable and uniform in case of convection as expected. The study helped in understanding influence of convection and microwave heating on development of product properties during baking of laminated doughs. The knowledge from this study will be useful in forming combination of these heating modes for optimising the process further.