ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a description of dough-making from the point of view of colloidal and surface chemistry. It illustrates the dough as an aqueous continuous medium of gluten and starch containing the dispersed gas phase. The chapter describes the role of added ingredients—salt, sugar, redox agents, gluten, enzymes, fats, and emulsifiers. It also describes how the main components of flour—proteins, lipids, starch—together form the dough. The chapter develops how their behavior and their interactions are affected by the environment in the aqueous dough system—how pH, salts, sugars, and redox agents influence the dough development. It also discusses the significance of mixing for the continuous gluten phase, and the inclusion of air. The viscoelastic behavior of dough is often attributed to the proteins. The chapter devoted to the description of fundamental rheological measurements on wheat flour doughs and one way to study the behavior of dough is with the aid of rheological methods.
