Prevent pastry dough discolouration naturally

White pastry doughs often change colour during storage due to enzymatic browning and so become less attractive to consumers.

The browning is driven by polyphenol oxidases, the same enzymes that are responsible for browning in apples and bananas. The enzymes catalyse the oxidation of different phenols to the corresponding quinines and these highly reactive compounds then polymerise to brown-coloured melanins.

While there are additives available that can help suppress this reaction, more and more consumers are requesting natural ingredients in their foods, so manufacturers are seeking alternative ways to preserve pastry, cake and pie doughs.

Swiss researchers, with funding from Jowa AG and Swiss Food Research, looked at ways of preventing or at least minimising pastry dough discolouration.

Initially they investigated various synthetic additives and showed that they had different effects on dough. For example, some caused a slight discolouration when initially added, but prevented further discolouration upon storage, while others kept the dough white from the get-go.

Turning to natural products, the researchers experimented with white wine, grape juice and lemon juice. They observed that a combination of white wine and lemon juice did the best job of inhibiting PPO activity and preventing enzymatic browning.

The paper’s abstract is available at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jafc.8b04477.

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