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Exploration of Sugar Functionality in Sugar-Snap and Wire-Cut Cookie Baking: Implications for Potential Sucrose Replacement or Reduction

¹USDA, ARS, Soft Wheat Quality Lab, Wooster, OH 44691. ²Corresponding author. E-mail: kweon.11@osu.edu ³Food Polymer Science Consultancy, Morris Plains, NJ 07950.

The sugar series—xylose, glucose, fructose, and sucrose—can be used diagnostically to explore the effects of sugar type on differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), Rapid Visco-Analyser (RVA), and cookie baking performance because of the differences in glass-forming abilities (related to plasticization) and solubility parameters (related to solvent preference) of different sugars. Sugar concentration (% S), total solvent (TS), and dough formulation defined a core experimental design for cookie baking with the four sugar types and two baking methods. Although wire-cut cookie baking (66% S and 64 TS) showed the same trends as sugar-snap cookie baking (73% S and 79 TS) for diameter, height, and moisture content, the wire-cut formulation enabled greater discrimination among the effects of different sugar types on dough and cookie responses. Use of two different crystal sizes of sucrose confirmed the dominant impact of both gluten development during dough mixing and starch pasting during cookie baking on collapse: the greater rate of dissolution of smaller sucrose crystals resulted in greater surface crack for sugar-snap cookies, and lower height for wire-cut cookies. Because the historical definition of an “excellent quality cookie flour” is based on the performance of a flour in a cookie formulated with sucrose, the effect of sugar type on cookie making is to transform the apparent baking performance of a flour. Whereas formulation with sucrose optimizes the flour performance for cookie baking, formulation with xylose exaggerates the worst aspects of cookie flour functionality and makes even the best cookie flour look like a “poor quality cookie flour”. Use of solvent retention capacity (SRC), DSC, RVA, and wire-cut cookie baking as predictive research tools demonstrated that identification of a flour with an optimized SRC pattern is the key to successful mitigation of the detrimental effects of sucrose replacement on cookie processing and product attributes.