Pasta quality inspection app:
Pasta quality inspection app for pasta manufacturing, wholesale, retail: full pasta quality control solution. Pasta quality checks, consistent pasta quality.
Pasta Supplier quality inspection & management
For OROMAS, the quality of its products is essential: superior quality pasta and the most appropriate flours and semolinas for each final use. The goodness of the raw materials used and having the best processing technology are necessary requirements, but alone they are not enough.
OROMAS has placed all its efforts into ensuring that our products meet the expectations of its customers and satisfy even the most demanding consumers. We strive to continue enjoying their trust and loyalty, by offering them good, natural, healthy and safe products. No effort or resources are spared to achieve this goal:
With our Research and Testing Centre: We invent, propose, test, develop, improve... products, tastes, flavours, texture, sensations...With the analysis and testing laboratories installed in each of the production centres: rigorous control of the quality and characteristics of all materials, ingredients and products.
Pasta Quality inspections during production
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The quality of pasta resides in a series of characteristics that are affected both by the properties of the raw materials and by the production process. The quality of pasta can be established by measuring a number of its characteristics which are considered the most important pasta quality parameters, such as colour, firmness during cooking and texture properties. In this article, the methods most commonly used for measuring these.
by Elena Curti and Eleonora Carini
The quality of pasta resides in a series of characteristics that are affected both by the properties of the raw materials and by the production process.
The quality of pasta can be established by measuring a number of its characteristics which are considered the most important pasta quality parameters, such as colour, firmness during cooking and texture properties. In this article, the methods most commonly used for measuring these parameters are described.
Colour
High quality pasta (either fresh or dried) is normally yellow in colour and can be measured using a variety of techniques.
Pasta Quality control & management
The ‘measurement’ of the pasta’s firmness during cooking is generally connected with two different parameters: the water absorbed during cooking and the solids lost to cooking. These parameters are measured on pasta samples, duly prepared and cooked.
The first step involves calculating the optimum cooking time. The official method (AACC 66-50.01) involves cooking a given quantity of spaghetti in distilled water, and then compressing a single strand of spaghetti between two thin glass plates at different cooking times. The optimum cooking time corresponds to the time required for the disappearance of the ‘white core’ (non gelatinised starch) in the heart of the strand following compression. Also for the other pasta shapes, representative samples/sections have to be prepared and then compressed in order to evaluate the disappearance of their ‘white core’.
This is followed by the cooking of a sample of pasta (with a known weight) in a pre-set quantity of water (usually distilled) on the basis of the optimum cooking time, or of lower or higher cooking times (in the case of more in-depth studies on the properties of cooked pasta).
After cooking, the pasta must be carefully drained and cooled for a standardised period of time that is always kept constant, before proceeding with the planned analyses.
The water absorbed during cooking (water-absorbing capacity) can be measured by weighing the pasta after cooking, and comparing this with its initial weight. The calculation of the solids lost to cooking is one of the most important parameters for determining the quality of cooked pasta and this article deals with the two main measuring methods, which involve collecting all the pasta cooking water.
Pasta factory hygiene checklist
The first method (AACC 66-50.01) involves completely drying the cooking water in a convection oven at a temperature of 105°C until a constant weight is reached. The solid residue remaining (g solids/100 g pasta) after the drying procedure consists of the solids released by the pasta during cooking. A quality pasta with a correctly structured gluten network will tend to lose a small amount of solids to cooking.
The second method involves the sedimentation of the solids present in the cooking water through the use of transparent graduated conical containers (Imhoff cones). The cooking water is poured into the cone and the cone is then filled to the top with distilled water (the cone usually holds one litre). The next step is the first phase of sedimentation, which lasts 24 hours; this is then followed by a stirring phase to make the liquid inside the cone uniform. Sedimentation is then repeated for a further 24 hours. The solids released correspond to the volume of sediment, determined by reading the corresponding level on the graduated cones. It is important to point out that this method, in addition to having longer analysis times, also presents results with a rather wide margin of variability.
There is a third method which involves the analytical determination of the quantity of organic substances (Total Organic Matter – TOM) released by the cooked pasta during an extremely precise ‘washing’ operation. The pasta is drained and ‘washed’ with a given quantity of water which serves to remove the organic matter from the surface of the pasta; a pre-set quantity is then removed and subjected to drying in the oven at 80°C.
The organic matter is then measured through titration with ferrous ammonium sulphate in excess of potassium dichromate, according to the formula below:
TOM (g/100g pasta) = ((B-S)* 20/B) * Fd* 0.00347, where B is the ferrous ammonium sulphate used for the white expressed in ml, S is the ferrous ammonium sulphate used to titrate the sample expressed in ml, Fd* is the dilution factor and 0.00347 is a correction factor for the incomplete transformation of the starch into glucose (97.25%) (D’Egidio et al., 1976).