Reaction Engineering for Sponge Cake Baking: Development of a Methodology to extract an Apparent Identifiable Reaction Scheme

Abstract

The food properties often results from a set of complex chemical reactions initiated by technological treatments. The ultimate objective of this work is to develop rational operating strategies for foods in order to preserve the integrity of the nutritional compounds or to enhance the production of positive newly formed compounds. A "reaction engineering" approach will allow building robust and reliable knowledge on the mechanisms and on the reaction kinetics and then formalizing them into models to optimize the product/process system. The present paper describes the first stage of this approach. It consists in extracting an apparent identifiable reaction scheme on the basis of theoretical knowledge of the system and observable experimental data and on the use of statistical methods.