Emulsifiers in Baked Goods

The use of food additives is necessary to maintain the quality and freshness of the food pro product. Food additives perform important functions in baked goods such as starch complexing, protein strengthening and aeration and may also offer some degree of emulsification.

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Baked goods without emulsifiers are tough, dry, leathery, stale and tasteless. An emulsion is a dispersion of small droplets of one immiscible liquid within another. Emulsifiers keep the droplets from coalescing. Let us understand in detail about the emulsifiers, what they are and what they exactly do.

Emulsifiers are chemical products that facilitate the uniform mixing of two immiscible substances or two immiscible mediums.

These mediums in different combinations could be:

Liquid and Liquid

Liquid and Gas

Liquid and Solid

Emulsifiers are amphiphilic substances i.e. having a lipophilic portion and a hydrophilic part. The lipophilic part is a long chain fatty acid. The hydrophilic part is either non-ionic (e.g. glycerol, propylene glycol, sorbitol, sucrose) or ionic negatively charged (such as lactic acid, acetic, citric acid).

Emulsifiers that are soluble in oil, favour water in oil emulsion (w/o) and water soluble emulsifiers favour oil in water (o/w) emulsion Example of w/o emulsion are margarines and butter icing.

Examples of o/w emulsions are milk, mayonnaise and ice-creams.

Yeast Raised Products Emulsifiers have two major functions in Yeast raised products: Dough conditioning/strengthening • Shelf life extension/crumb softening Dough conditioners/strengtheners (protein interaction) During the formation of dough, a protein network is formed by gluten. If the gluten is of poor quality or is weakened during

Yeast Raised Products

Emulsifiers have two major functions in Yeast raised products:

• Dough conditioning/strengthening

• Shelf life extension/crumb softening