Zanahoria

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Modern Applied Science

Vol. 4, No. 7; July 2010

The Drawbacks and Superiorities of Using IR-Microwave System in Cake and Bread Baking: A Review
K.A. Abbas (Corresponding author) Department of Food Technology, Faculty of Food Science and Technology Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia Tel: 60-3-8946-8534 E-mail: ali_kassim@hotmail.com

S. M.Abdulkarim Department of Food Science, Faculty of Food Science and Technology Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia M. Ebrahimian Department of Food Technology, Faculty of Food Science and Technology Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia N. Suleiman Department of Food Technology, Faculty of Food Science and Technology Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia Abstract This review work tried to highlight and summarize the drawbacks and superiorities of three different heating methods commonly used for baking bread and cakes. These methods are infrared heating, microwave heating and infrared-microwave heating. The literature revealed that infrared heating method usually result in good quality food products, but the systemperformance is still underdeveloped to meet challenges of the current era. Whereas microwave heating method possesses superior system performance features but present many problems with the eating quality of the final food product. In order to improve both system performance and the food quality, researchers found that the infrared-microwave system is the best alternative. This system (halogenlamp-microwave) is a combination of the first two heating methods and at optimized conditions; the system can produce good quality food with better performance. Studies revealed that the good crust color formation and time saving are the superiorities, but the lower moisture content and lower specific volume are the drawbacks on using such system. The products were firmer as a result of the high moistureloss. Halogen lamp power, microwave power and baking time are found to be the major factors that affect the characteristics of the baked products. Based on the heating effects, it is possible to conclude that microwave heating is the dominant heating mechanism in halogen lamp–microwave combination system. However, this system was still be able to produce acceptable quality of baked productstherefore researchers recommended IR-microwave for cake and bread baking. Keywords: Bread, Cake, Baking, Infrared, Microwave, Infrared-Microwave Introduction Although the infrared heating is producing good eating quality baked foods, but many drawbacks are inherent regarding system performance. Therefore the microwave heating was emerging to overcome these drawbacks. However, many quality problems havecome into sight again to be associated with microwave-baked products. Microwave-baked products are firm, tough in texture, rapidly staled, dry, lack of color and crust (Sevimli et al., 2005). Cakes baked in a microwave oven had the lowest quality (Sumnu et al., 2005b). It was also found that insufficient starch gelatinization in microwave-baked cakes in which the degree of gelatinization rangedfrom 55% to 78% depending on formulation (Sakiyan et al., 2009). Microwave heating is also not commonly used in mass production. Among the drawbacks are non-uniformity of heating since it is very much depending on the geometry, thickness and the dielectric properties of the material; there is no common method to monitor or control the electromagnetic field distribution and its effect after the

42ISSN 1913-1844

E-ISSN 1913-1852

www.ccsenet.org/mas

Modern Applied Science

Vol. 4, No. 7; July 2010

microwave is switched on and high in cost (Vadivambal and Jayas, 2007). In order to reduce non-uniformity heating, carousel has been used and Geedipalli et al. (2007) has successfully determined the power absorbed in the food as a function of the angle of rotation of the...