Bleaching, maturing agents

Background
• Bleaching and maturing agents are added to whiten and
improve the baking quality quickly.
• Even fine wheat flours vary in colour from yellow to cream
when freshly milled.
• At this stage, the flour produces doughs that are usually sticky
and do not handle well.
• Flour improves with age under proper storage conditions up to
one year, both in color and quality.
• Because storing flour is expensive, toward the close of the 19th
century, millers began to treat freshly milled flour with
oxidizing agents to bleach it and give it the handling
characteristics of naturally aged flour.
 Definitions
• Food additive that acts on flour or dough
to improve dough handling properties or
baking quality or colour of bakery products.
 So what are Bleaching agents?
• Bleach means to fade
• Bleaching agents would bleach the products in which
they are added

Bleaching of flour is obtained by an oxidation reaction on its yellow pigment so that the
finished flour is whiter than untreatedflour.

• Kent-Jones, English cereal chemist, stored unbleached flour in air, in vacuum, and in
hydrogen (27), and he found, to quote his concluding paragraph: “After the two
months, the flours were compared again. The one exposed to the air had acquired
theusual bleach. The one kept in the vacuum had not bleached atall. The hydrogen-
bottled flour was also scarcely changed. Theoxidizing action of the air in causing the
bleach in aged flours wasthus proved conclusively.”
• Commercial bleaching may reduce this
pigmentation by 90 to 97%.
 What are Maturing agents?
• Maturing agents are additives that similarly
change the baking properties of flours by
strengthening the wheat gluten network in a
shorter time.

• Chlorine dioxide produces these typical effects

than does natural long-time storage aging.
 Benefits
• Maturing of cake flour enables the baker and
the housewife to obtain products with greatly
improved grain and texture, and larger
volume.
• cake batters made from chlorine treated flour are more
tolerant, less likely to fall, and will carry a higher percentage
of shortening and sugar, and thus they product a sweeter and
more tender cake than untreated flours
Benefits of Bleaching and Maturing agents
• maturing agents cause the following changes.
Developmental maturing or artificial aging which directly
improves the baking quality.

A chemical bleaching action results in change in the yellow

pigment of flour. These pigments are not only used in
extremely small amounts but they also consist primarily of
xanthophyll and xanthophyll esters which are not convertible
into vitamin A in animals.
• A better color because of a physical change in the bread
which is caused by finer texture and grain.
 Which products?
Usually Cereal products
• From earliest recorded times, man has tried to secure a
white flour, because it symbolized to him a pure and
wholesome product.

• Many of the millers guarded their early application of

bleaching agents to flour with secrecy, because they had
discovered the desire of the consumer for an improved
flour. The bleached flour of today represents the
culmination of centuries of such efforts.
What are the different bleaching agents?

• Earlier it started with nitrogen peroxide.

• Then Bakers started using chlorine, which
improved colour as well as baking quality
• Nitrogen trichloride was the next one to be
used
• Further chlorine dioxide completely replaced
nitrogen trichloride
 Different maturing and bleaching agents

• Nitrogen, chlorine, nitrosyl chloride, chlorine

dioxide, and benzoyl peroxide. Potassium
bromate has a maturing action in a dough.
Mode of action of bleaching agents