ABSTRACT
The baking of bread starts with mixing, a process in which wheat flour, water, yeast and other ingredients are transformed into a dough during mechanical treatment. The structure of the baked product and sensorial attributes related to “texture” or “consistency” is to a great extent related to the physical changes and phase transitions occurring in the cereal components. This chapter deals with transitions like glass transitions, starch gelatinization and retrogradation, protein denaturation, and crystallization. It presents a description of the individual flour components—starch, proteins, lipids, arabinoxylans—and the thermal transitions they can undergo when heated in the presence of water. The thermal behavior of cereal components, or more or less complicated doughs, is of course studied in order to learn more about the baking process and the baked product. The chapter provides a few examples on how thermal behavior has been used to understand, and even predict, the properties and quality of the end product.
