Congelamento di panetti per pizza: effetti sulla cinetica di lievitazione e sul comportamento reologico

The spread on a global scale of the consumption of pizza together with the growing demand for quality products faithful to the tradition of origin of this food, opens the way towards new market frontiers in which it can be hypothesized to sell a pizza dough prepared according to the regulations “TSG”, and then frozen to be distributed as a semi-finished product. In this sense, a study was launched aimed at evaluating the effects of freezing on leavening and on the rheological properties of the doughs after subsequent thawing. The purpose of this study was to identify the optimal leavening stage for freezing pizza dough, in order to obtain thawed and leavened blocks with a similar rheological behavior compared to the non-frozen control. From the analysis of the leavening kinetics, a reduction in the final volume of the dough is observed compared to the control, the more marked the longer the leavening time prior to freezing. Furthermore, there are significant differences in the rheological properties of frozen doughs after thawing, which can be attributed to the damage on gluten cross-linking, mainly produced by the formation of ice crystals during storage.