ABSTRACT
Bread staling is characterized by many physical and chemical phenomena such as changes in texture, water migration, starch crystallization, and component interactions. Analyses of bread staling have evolved over time, as instrumental technology and knowledge of the subject have progressed. Careful selection of techniques offers a strategy to investigate the bread staling mechanism. This chapter focuses on the fundamental tests used to understand the mechanism of bread staling. It is the most popular method of evaluating staleness of bread. Sensory tests are most common in the practical world for evaluating the staleness of bread. However, sensory evaluation suffers from subjective results that are difficult to relate to physiochemical phenomena probed by instrumental analysis. A basic approach for visualizing the microstructure of a sample is to obtain a magnified view of its components through microscopic techniques. Nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a spectroscopy technique that can be used to obtain a three-dimensional representation of the systems' molecular properties.
