Properties and Shelf-life of Part-and Full-baked Flat Bread (Barbari) at Ambient and Frozen Storage

Production of part-baked bread is a successful method to postpone bread staling that has been applied widely for production of loaves. In this research, production and some physical characteristics of part-baked flat bread (Barbari) including hardness, volume, color, weight loss, and microstructure were studied during the storage of the samples at ambient (25ºC) and freezing (-18ºC) temperatures. The part-baked bread had higher moisture content than the control and full-baked breads. However, it had a shelf-life of 72 hours, which was shorter than the control at ambient temperature. Full-baking could level out the effects of staling and, hence, the quality of the full-baked bread was similar to that of the fresh bread. For the frozen samples, the optimum storage time was two months. The undesirable effects of frozen storage were more significant for the part-baked bread. Moreover, full-baking could compensate some of the adverse effects of freezing and the resultant bread had superior quality compared with the control.