Use of Lineal-Path Distribution Function as Statistical Descriptor of the Crumb Structure of Bread

The importance of the relation between food microstructure and their quality is recognized as crucial. In terms of bread quality, the precise characterization of the crumb structure is considered essential to evaluate its sensorial properties. A variety of different statistical correlation functions have been theoretically formulated in recent years to quantify the microstructure of general random heterogeneous materials but they have rarely been applied in food science. In this paper, we have developed a method to calculate the lineal-path distribution function L(x) for the void and solid matrix phases from two-dimensional (2D) images of bread. The method has been successfully employed here to characterize the microstructure for two type of commercial breads. Our results reveal that crumb structure may be modeled as a system of polydispersed overlapping disks. Moreover, we have quantified the dimensions of the voids and crumb phase statistically and differences in the homogeneity of crumb structure.