Food or edible material: processes – compositions – and products – Product is grooved or corrugated
Patent
1993-06-14
1995-05-30
Pratt, Helen
Food or edible material: processes, compositions, and products
Product is grooved or corrugated
426 94, 426502, 426517, 426549, 426552, 426553, A21C 1102, A21D 802
Patent
active
054199034
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
The invention relates to biscuits.
There are recognized recipes for biscuit doughs, each of which produces a biscuit of a certain kind having characteristic qualities (in addition to taste) including hardness, crunchiness and crispness as perceived by a consumer. Those qualities depend mainly on the composition of the dough, principally, the fat and sugar content, but to some extent on the process by which the biscuit is produced and on the thickness of the biscuit.
At least in the case of certain kinds of biscuit, a decrease in the fat content could be beneficial to a consumer for dietary reasons, but decreasing the fat content of a particular kind of biscuit usually results in a reduction in perceived quality, for example, an increase in hardness, or a decrease in crunchiness or crispness. A decrease in the fat content, sufficient to be significant for dietary purposes, of a recognised dough recipe generally results in a biscuit that is less acceptable to the consumer.
It has now been found that the acceptability of a biscuit to a consumer can be increased if, instead of the biscuit being substantially equally likely to fracture along any line in the plane of the biscuit, it is markedly more likely to fracture along lines extending in a first direction in the plane of the biscuit than it is along lines extending in the plane of the biscuit in a second direction, the second direction being perpendicular to the first direction.
The invention provides a process for producing biscuits, which comprises forming a biscuit dough into a fiat sheet, feeding that sheet to a pair of corrugated rollers which impart a corrugated configuration to the sheet, cutting generally laminar portions from the sheet, and baking the portions to form biscuits. Each biscuit has a corrugated configuration such that it has a fracture ratio, as hereinafter defined, of at least 1.5.
The invention also provides a biscuit having a corrugated configuration such that the fracture ratio (as hereinafter defined) of the biscuit is at least 1.5.
The expression "fracture ratio" of a biscuit is used throughout the specification to mean the ratio of the resistance to breaking (as hereinafter defined) of the biscuit in a direction perpendicular to the direction in which the corrugations extend to the resistance to breaking of the biscuit in the direction along which the corrugations extend. Thus, the fracture ratio is the factor by which the resistance to breaking in a direction perpendicular to the direction in which the corrugations extend exceeds the resistance to breaking in the direction in which the corrugations extend.
The expression "resistance to breaking", of a biscuit, in a specified direction, is used throughout the specification to mean the force required to break the biscuit when it is subjected to the following test. The biscuit is supported in an Instron Universal Penetrometer model 1140, which is an instrument that is well known in the art and is widely available. It is essentially a device for driving a probe towards an item to be tested at a constant speed (which can be set), and it includes a load cell having a maximum load capacity of 5000 g, which measures the force with which the advance of the probe is resisted by the item under test. The item to be tested has to be supported, and the means of support to be used here comprises two rollers which each have a diameter of 20 mm and of which the axes are parallel to one another, horizontal, and separated from each other by 52.5 mm.
The spacing of the axes of the rollers, on which a biscuit to be tested is supported, is stated above to be 52.5 mm for the sake of definiteness. It will usually be found, however, that increasing the separation to, say, 58 mm will not significantly affect the value of the fracture ratio (although it will alter the individual values of the resistance to breaking), and will tend to improve the reproducibility of the measurements of resistance to breaking. Accordingly, using a separation of 58 mm may permit a reduction in the number of biscuits that hav
REFERENCES:
patent: 3956517 (1976-05-01), Curry et al.
patent: 4511586 (1985-04-01), Fitzwater et al.
patent: 4680191 (1987-07-01), Budd et al.
patent: 4855151 (1989-08-01), Fielding
patent: 4973481 (1990-11-01), Hunt et al.
Dodson Adrian G.
Evans Garfield G.
Rycraft Debra
Townsend Geoffrey M.
Wilkes Malcolm S.
Pratt Helen
United Biscuits (UK) Limited
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