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Baking Formula Innovation to Eliminate Chlorine Treatment of Cake Flour

¹U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Soft Wheat Quality Laboratory, Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, Ohio State University, Wooster, OH 44691. Names are necessary to report factually on available data; however, the USDA neither guarantees nor warrants the standard of the product, and the use of the name by the USDA implies no approval of the product to the exclusion of others that may also be suitable. ²Corresponding author. E-mail: gaines.31@osu.edu

Chlorine treatment of soft wheat flour improves cake volume and produces a stiffer, more resilient crumb. Four pairs of chlorine-treated and untreated flours were obtained. A selected portion of the area under the Rapid Visco Analyser hot pasting flour viscosity curve was used to determine how much starch could be used with a nonchlorine-treated flour so that the area is equivalent to that produced by a chlorine-treated cake flour with no added starch. Replacement of nonchlorine-treated flour with up to 43% starch produced areas under the pasting curve that were equivalent to those produced by chlorine-treated flours. Increased concentration of dried egg albumen plus added soya lecithin and xanthan gum were included in the formulation containing starch and nonchlorine treated flour to produce a new basic ingredient set. The basic ingredient set was evaluated for its influence on cake geometry, crumb structure, and crumb texture response to compression (hardness and spring-back rate). High-ratio white layer cakes using the new basic ingredient set produced similar or better cake quality characteristics than those produced using control chlorine-treated flours. The same new basic ingredient set was used to produce pound cakes, cupcakes, and sheet cakes using nonchlorinated flours. The geometry and objective texture of those cakes also were equivalent to respective cakes produced with chlorine-treated flour. The basic ingredient set does not require any special flour treatment.