CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Several epidemiological and experimental studies show that consumption of determined food products can act either as protective or as risk factors on non-transmissible diseases. Recommendations have emerged that aim to reducing the ingestion of sugars and fats, or to increase the fiber content (particularly soluble) in the diet. Biscuit or cookie dough is a complex system containing abundant components in different states, such as starch, gluten, lipids (flour constituents), sugars, fats and water. In biscuits, both, the incorporation of fibers or the reduction of sugar and fat, create a number of technological problems in processing and in some cases a loss of acceptability [1]. For this reason, the effects on the physico-chemical, rheological and structural characteristics of biscuit dough upon incorporation or reduction of determined ingredients is of great interest in food industry. It is generally known that the distribution of water can affect the rheology of the dough machinability [2]. Low resolution NMR is an important tool as it allows the study of water mobility by means of relaxation time measurements (T2) in the sample, in a non-invasively, fast and accessible way. In this work we study the proton water mobility in standard biscuit dough through relaxation profiles obtained from a CPMG sequence at 0.5 Tesla. Different populations are assigned to different ingredients [3]. The dependence of mobility as a function of the dough temperature in a cooking process is correlated to rheological experiments. We analyzed the quality of the final product upon variation of different parameters in the biscuit formula, such as reduction of fat, reduction of sugar and incorporation of fiber with flour reduction. [1] Maache-Rezzoug et al. Journal of food engineering 35, 23-42 (1998). [2] Ruan et al. Cereal Chemistry, 76, 231?235 (1999). [3] Assifaoui et al. Carbohydrate Polymers 64, 197?204 (2006).