Speaker
Description
Water migration is a key factor in bread staling, influencing texture and freshness through redistribution between crumb and crust. In this work, neutron imaging is used as a non-invasive technique to study water migration in bread during staling with high spatial and temporal resolution, taking advantage of the strong sensitivity of neutrons to hydrogen. This approach allows changes in local water content to be followed continuously in the same sample, providing region-specific information that is not accessible with destructive measurement techniques. Two bread samples were measured over several days: a non-sealed sample allowing moisture exchange with the environment and a sealed sample representing a closed system. The resulting two-dimensional water profiles confirm that the non-sealed sample exhibits an overall loss of water, with the crumb drying faster than the crust, while the sealed sample shows internal redistribution of water from crumb to crust with nearly constant total water content. The water migration for the two cases is compared with diffusion and sorption models. This study demonstrates that neutron imaging can provide quantitative, region-specific insight into water migration during bread staling.