Summary and conclusions
New methods for comprehensive characterization of foam
structure in breads have been developed. The visualization
workflow for analysis of pore clusters in tomography data in three
dimensions was applied to breads. The results from the workflow
showed that breads and cakes exhibit a maze-like structure as all
the open cells were connected, creating a single, large, highly
tortuous cell that is open to atmosphere and accounted for 99% of
total porosity. The three-dimensional visualization helped to
isolate the closed cells from the open cell in breads. This is the
first time such delineation of closed and open pores in bakery
products is reported. Whether closed cells existed in single or
cluster forms appeared to affect the mechanical properties of
breads. The existence of an extensive, open cell explains why
breads (and cakes) do not collapse under ambient conditions
when taken out of the oven. Hypotheses have been proposed for
the importance of the extensively propagating open cell in
controlling toughness of breads. Future work utilizing structuremechanical
models has been proposed for investigating the role
of open and closed pores on the physical properties and texture of
breads.