Hardness of caramel biscuits
Dear Members,
I ask for your advice, how can I reach the required structure of caramel biscuit. I just start the baking of caramel biscuit, but the biscuits are to hard and not enoug high. I use natrium-hydrogecarbonat as reasing agent, I increased its dosage as well, but the baked caramel biscuits are not enogh fine structure, well to hard, well hard to bite. Could you please give me some advice and send me information, where is the proper place to get relevant technological description for baking caramel biscuit.
Thank you all in advance.
Márton
Hi Marton
The hardness, shape and size of Caramel biscuits depends on balancing the ingredients and the processing method correctly with sugars, fats and raising agents playing and important role.
The natrium-hydrogecarbonat you mention is called Sodium Bicarbonate in English and this can be used on its own or with a small amount of acid. As well as producing CO2 it changes the biscuit pH to alkaline darkening the biscuit crumb colour during baking. However when Sodium Bicarbonate is used on its own it doesn’t produce as much CO2 as when it is mixed with an acid and the biscuit texture may be dense and hard (not expanded). In this situation an additional raising agent could be added such as Ammonium Bicarbonate which is a very efficient raising agent producing a lot of CO2 and this should increase the biscuit size and open up the texture.
The dough mixing method and the particle size of the sugar can also affect the hardness of the biscuit with fully dissolved sugar giving a hard brittle texture. To prevent the sugar fully dissolving a balance of fine and course particle sugar is often used together with a reduced cream up stage in the mixing process.
I hope this helps
Andrew Hughes
Help Sárközi Márton by registering and answering.
The score is based on the number of published articles (20 points for every approved article), number of accepted answers (10 points for every accepted answer) and the number of asked questions (3 points for every asked question). The list is showing only top 10 TechTalkers.
