Enhancing the fermentation performance of frozen dough by ultrasonication: Effect of starch hierarchical structures

In this work, the fermentation properties and quality attributes of fresh and ultrasonicated dough and the hierarchical structure of starches isolated from ultrasonicated dough were evaluated to understand the causal relations. It can be observed that ultrasound treatment could improve the dough fermentation performance, including the maximum height, total CO2 volume, and CO2 retention volume, by controlling the irradiation time (within 20 min), consequently enhancing the specific volume of steamed bread and decreasing its hardness. And these changes may be attributed to the pores and cracks that emerged on granular structure, relatively polydisperse semicrystalline lamellae, lessened amounts of crystallites, reduced short-range ordered degree and double helix fractions, which facilitated the interaction between yeast and starch granules, eventually improving the dough fermentation performance and developing high-quality steamed bread. These results indicate that ultrasound treatment is beneficial for designing steamed bread with tailored quality through rationally controlling the intrinsic starch structure in dough.