Cereal Chem 64:158-163   |  VIEW ARTICLE

A Mechanism for Cookie Dough Setting.

L. C. Doescher, R. C. Hoseney, and G. A. Milliken. Copyright 1987 by the American Association of Cereal Chemists, Inc. 

Cookie doughs heated in an electrical resistance oven expanded at a specific temperature. The temperature at which rapid dough expansion began was strongly correlated to set time during baking. Scanning electron micrographs of cookie doughs and baked cookies showed that a change occurs during baking. Cookie doughs had a discontinuous structure, whereas baked cookies had a continuous structure. An apparent gluten glass transition was found in isolated gluten and in flour. The glass transition temperature (Tg) of the hard wheat flour was significantly lower than that of the soft wheat flour. The Tg of the flours approximated the temperature at which rapid dough expansion began in the resistance oven. We propose that when gluten undergoes a glass transition, it expands to form a continuous matrix, and viscosity increases, causing cookie doughs to stop spreading. The Tg was not the same for the hard and soft wheat flours, which accounts for at least part of the difference between these two flours.