Dr. Banu Sezer
Market Development Manager – Global Food&Feed
Anton Paar GmbH

As enriched flours with added vitamins, minerals, and fibers become more common, understanding their effects on dough structure is essential. Using advanced rheological instruments like the Brabender FarinoGraph, ExtensoGraph, and Amylograph, bakers and food scientists can analyze dough properties, adjust formulations, and ensure high-quality baked goods. These tools help optimize hydration, elasticity, and starch behavior, ensuring fortified flours maintain the desired texture and performance in modern baking.

In today’s baking industry, flour is more than just a raw ingredient—it’s a carefully designed component that determines texture, flavor, and nutritional value. With growing demand for enriched and fortified flours, manufacturers are incorporating vitamins, minerals, and functional additives to improve the health benefits of baked goods. While fortification serves to improve nutritional value, it also significantly alters how flour behaves during mixing, fermentation, and baking. The challenge is to maintain dough consistency and overall baking performance while boosting the nutritional profile of flour.

Behind every perfect loaf of bread, crisp baguette, or soft pastry, there’s a crucial factor at play—dough consistency. Achieving the ideal dough texture involves not just selecting the right ingredients, but also understanding how these ingredients interact during mixing, proving, and baking. For decades, advanced rheological instruments from Brabender (now part of Anton Paar) have been indispensable tools for bakers, millers, and food scientists, enabling them to fine-tune formulations and achieve high-quality results consistently. Globally, food policies have encouraged flour fortification to combat malnutrition. Many countries mandate the addition of iron and folic acid to prevent anemia and birth defects, while others experiment with fortifying flour with zinc, fiber, or even probiotics to enhance gut health. However, modifying flour composition also affects its behavior in baking. The challenge lies in maintaining dough consistency and baking performance while improving nutritional value. The Brabender 3-Phase-System, with its FarinoGraph, ExtensoGraph, and Amylograph, provides the necessary insights to maintain dough integrity while boosting nutritional value.

The FarinoGraph: Cracking the Code of Dough Mixing

Enriched flours, often fortified with fiber, proteins, or micronutrients, can significantly influence dough hydration, structure, and elasticity. To ensure consistent quality, bakers and researchers rely on specialized rheological tools to analyze dough performance at different stages of production. The Brabender FarinoGraph is particularly useful in measuring water absorption and dough development during mixing. It helps determine how enriched flours interact with water to form an ideal dough structure. A well-balanced dough should develop a strong gluten network while maintaining proper hydration. If fortification alters these properties, adjustments in water content, mixing time, or ingredient ratios may be required to maintain consistency.

Fig. 1. Brabender FarinoGraph with AquaInject

The FarinoGraph allows bakers to monitor water absorption, track mixing performance, and evaluate dough stability across different flour batches. This makes it possible to maintain uniform quality in enriched flour blends, even when formulations change. By providing a deeper understanding of how fortified flours behave during mixing, the FarinoGraph plays a crucial role in ensuring consistent dough texture and quality.

The ExtensoGraph: Stretching Dough to Its Limits

While the FarinoGraph focuses on the kneading phase, the Brabender ExtensoGraph provides valuable insights into how the dough will behave during proving and baking. Flours fortified with fibers, proteins, or alternative grains can affect dough elasticity, often making it stiffer or less extensible. The Brabender ExtensoGraph measures dough extensibility and elasticity, ensuring that enriched dough still has the ability to rise and expand properly during fermentation and baking. This step is especially critical for bakers working with enriched flours, as the additional nutrients can alter gluten interactions. For example, fiber can increase resistance to stretching, while iron fortification may weaken the gluten structure, if not carefully balanced. By understanding these factors, bakers can modify their formulations to ensure that fortified dough performs just as well as traditional dough in various baked goods, from bread to pasta.

Fig. 2. Brabender ExtensoGraph

The Brabender ExtensoGraph helps predict how added ingredients will affect dough’s stretching and gas retention, allowing bakers to fine-tune the balance between dough strength and extensibility. This is particularly useful when developing whole grain or high-fiber breads, where dough must be carefully controlled to prevent dense or heavy textures.

The Amylograph: Unlocking the Secrets of Starch

Enriched flours often contain added enzymes, emulsifiers, or modified starches that can influence dough viscosity and overall baking performance. The Brabender Amylograph provides insights into how these changes affect starch gelatinization and enzyme activity, which are vital for controlling fermentation and the formation of crust color through the Maillard reaction. This phase is crucial for evaluating enzyme activity in flours, as it affects sugar availability for yeast fermentation and determines the texture and color of the final baked product.

Fig. 3. Brabender Amylograph-E 

For flours that have been fortified with amylase or other improvers, the Amylograph ensures proper control over starch breakdown during the baking process. This control is essential to avoid undesirable baking defects, such as overly gummy or dry textures. The Amylograph also helps optimize formulations to extend product shelf life by improving dough stability and consistency throughout the production process.

Bringing It All Together: The Power of Data-Driven Baking

The modern baking industry often depends on additives to enhance flour properties, although their use is subject to regulatory restrictions and ongoing health debates. Functional ingredients, such as amylase enzymes, lipids, minerals, fibers, and water-retention agents, can significantly impact dough texture, fermentation stability, and shelf life. These ingredients are used to improve product volume, stability, and freshness. 

Lipases, in general, are enzymes that divide complex fat structures into single fatty acids. A lipase enzyme preparation, which interacts especially with triglycerides, phosphatides and other fatty acid esters from plant-based sources, is used to enhance the resistance of dough against mechanical stress, and to increase dough stability as well as volume yield. The use of the selected lipase enzyme preparation increased the dough stability as well as the water absorption and diminished the degree of softening (Fig. 4). 

Fig. 4. Farinogram - Additive “lipase enzyme preparate”

The use of emulsifier makes it possible to compound water and fluid fat. A powdery emulsifier with a particular small particle size and consists of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids had shown no effect on the test results of the Farinogram curve. But it had a positive effect on the fermentation stability and generated an equal poring of yeast-raised baking products. The emulsifier helps to keep bakery products fresh for a longer time, and increases the machinability of dough (Fig. 5).

Fig. 5. Farinogram - Additive “emulsifier”

Additives like antioxidants are used to prevent food from oxidation and thereby extending their shelf life. A pure ascorbic acid preparation, which is used to accelerate flour maturation and to improve certain dough properties like fermentation stability and fermentation tolerance, showed little effect on the dough properties during kneading process, except a small decrement of dough stability and a higher degree of softening. 

A non-digestible fiber with high water retention properties can be used in different kinds of food for texture modification, yield improvement and water loss reduction. The addition of a non-digestible fiber strongly increased the water absorption of the flour and has almost no visible effect on the curve progression. 

Fig. 6. Farinogram - Additive “ascorbic acid”

Hemicellulase is a collective term for enzymes that that are able to hydrolyze polysaccharides from plant substances called hemicellulose. For example, a pure fungus hemicellulose is used to increase dough tenacity and crumb elasticity. It also has a positive effect on the oven spring and the volume of baking products. The more of the selected mix is used, the weaker the gluten structure of the dough becomes, which can be concluded from the decreasing dough stability and increasing degree of softening. Another example is L-cysteine, which is a non-essential, proteinogenic, sulfurous amino acid that divides disulphide bridges of proteins, and by that, increases the fraction of linear protein strands. The standardized L-cysteine separates the gluten in smaller elements, whereby dough elasticity increases and protein structure declamps. It has a strong influence on the dough stability, which decreases faster the more additive is used. Vital wheat gluten is used to increase water absorption, dough stability and to improve the machinability of flour. The curve progressions are all very similar to the reference curve (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7. Farinogram - Additive “standardized  L-cysteine”

All of these additives can be closely monitored and controlled using Brabender FarinoGraph, which helps manufacturers adjust formulations and fine-tune dough characteristics. However, it’s important to note that these examples reflect selected preparations, and formulations may differ in results depending on the source or formulation of the additives.

In the world of modern baking, Anton Paar’s Brabender product portfolio empowers bakers to create innovative, healthier baked goods without sacrificing quality or performance. By providing precise measurements and detailed data, these instruments help bakeries deliver consistent, high-quality products, whether they’re using traditional flours, or those enriched with the latest nutritional advancements. Through data-driven insights, the future of baking is now more precise, efficient, and sustainable than ever before.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Banu Sezer is the Market Development Manager – Global Food & Feed at Anton Paar GmbH, where she drives strategic growth by advancing market opportunities for analytical, process, and quality control solutions in the food and feed industries. She holds a BSc, MSc, and PhD in Food Engineering from Hacettepe University, Türkiye. With over a decade of experience in quality control, production, and engineering, Dr. Sezer has a proven track record of optimizing operational efficiency and ensuring regulatory compliance. She has also partnered with leading companies to enhance food safety, implement quality assurance programs, and drive process innovation. 

e-mail: banu.sezer@anton.paar.com