A new acoustic technique to monitor bread dough during the fermentation phase

The fermentation phase represents one of the most important stages in the bread-making process and its characterization is therefore necessary to control and improve the quality of the final product. However, the methods used for the characterization of this phase are limited by the lack of investigation techniques considering the complexity of the medium at this stage due to its instability and to the presence of gas bubbles. In this work, we propose a low frequency acoustic technique to characterize this complex phenomenon. With this aim in view, a measuring device was designed, through which the possibility of monitoring, non-destructively, the kinetics of bread dough fermentation was validated in order to study the influence of various technological parameters such as temperature and the different ingredients.