Study of structure and flavour release relationships in low moisture bakery products by means of the acoustic–mechanical combined technique and electronic nose

An acoustic-mechanical combined technique was employed to contemporary characterize in uniaxial compression mode the mechanical and the acoustic properties of commercial and laboratory–made sliced breads that were produced by modifying the amount of sucrose in the product recipe. The Image Analysis technique was also used to get information on the morphology of the gas cells. The analysis of the flavour release was performed by means of a commercial electronic nose composed with a sensor array of 23 different sensors and a pattern recognition software. Advanced techniques of multivariate statistical analysis were employed to get the maximum information from the proposed instrumental techniques. Some selected mechanical parameters and flavour release responses are dominant in discriminating sliced bread samples and express similar information both as position and importance. The Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) outputs for the acoustic, mechanical and flavour release data were the following: Non Error Rate % equal to 92.1% in the fitting mode and Non Error Rate Cross Validated % equal to 78.9% in the cross validation mode. By combining the three instrumental objective characterization methods, the goodness of the texture /aroma description of these cellular solids was improved.