Thymly Products works with different bakeries to custom blend ingredients for tortillas. Our ingredients include a wide range of Baking Powders, Dough Conditioners, Flavors, Batch Packs, and Shelf Life Systems that can manipulate the functionality of your tortilla to improve quality and make the product run better. Tortillas are one of the fasted growing products. Our process ensures that tortillas have the best appearance and long shelf life.
This article highlights common production challenges. Thymly Products eliminates many of these challenges with our systems and quality control measures before our custom blending patches are packaged and shipped off.
From a flour tortilla manufacturer’s perspective, if any product appearance changes happen during a production run, their first thought may be to blame their production process. Most producers are less focused on why or how these variations occurred and instead take a reactive approach to fix issues on a case-by-case basis.
However, poor ingredient quality can ruin all efforts, even with complete control over the production process. Because the recipe is relatively uncomplicated, the quality of the finished product depends significantly on the quality of the ingredients.
Relying solely on static flour specifications from millers is risky
Many bakers prioritize flour parameters like protein, starch, and ash content, which they specify to their miller. Unfortunately, most tortilla manufacturers today merely accept flour deliveries from their millers without doing their due diligence to ensure the miller’s specifications meet exact standards. Millers only typically state protein quantity on their deliveries, but do not provide information on the quality of protein, or the availability of starch.
Many flour tortillas manufacturers may not realize that product inconsistencies result from an imbalance of specific and controllable flour parameters. Rather than guessing at the cause of the issue, or worse, simply making on-the-fly manual adjustments to a recipe until it looks correct, with just a little education, flour tortilla producers can become more proactive and reduce product inconsistencies before they start.
What is causing these common flour tortilla production challenges?
1) Dough Stickiness
Suppose the flour tortilla dough in the mixer appears excessively sticky. Typically, the tortilla maker will simply add more flour or reduce water to their mixer until they arrive at a reasonable consistency for their dough. This subjective and potentially costly practice can lead to processing machine problems when dividing and pressing tortillas.
Even if all other measurements are correct, an imbalance of starch damage or low levels of protein can cause an excessively sticky dough. On the contrary, an excess of pentosans and protein content in the flour can create a dough that is too loose.
2) Tortilla Size and Shape Inconsistencies
Gluten quality directly impacts a tortilla’s size and shape, as it relates to the elasticity and extensibility of tortilla doughs and their ability to hold their shape for baking.
Also, a too-small tortilla often has flour made with harder wheat. On the other hand, a weak flour can give a thinner tortilla with less gas retention.
3) Tortilla Rollability/Foldability/Flexibility
Flexibility is a crucial parameter of tortilla quality, and protein has a direct effect. Low protein content (<9%) will yield an inflexible, brittle, but more extensible product. On the other hand, higher protein (>12%) will give a more flexible tortilla but one of a smaller diameter.
Beyond protein quantity, the quality of the protein network and the extensibility/elasticity balance it possesses and supplies the dough is critical. Flexibility is also positively influenced by the addition of amylase and lower levels of starch damage.
4) Shelf Life
After baking, starch in the tortilla tends to recrystallize partially. This phenomenon is called starch retrogradation, which has detrimental effect on the sensory and storage qualities of many starchy foods like tortillas. The faster the retrogradation, the quicker the flour tortilla will lose its freshness. Again, starch damage and other flour quality factors can affect the speed of retrogradation.
