One of the current projects I have at work is redesigning packaging for donuts to address "dried out" customer comments. Being an engineer, I want a quantitative method to determine dried out vs good donuts, but our food technologists group has insisted the only test is a qualitative method: feel and eat the donuts to determine what's good and what's bad at the end of shelf life. That wasn't good enough for me since personal tastes are a little different. I tried weighing them to determine if weight loss was a factor but that's given me inconclusive results, and then it hit me that I've got a moisture meter at home that just might tell me what I need to know. Turns out it works great! It seems the sweet spot is somewhere between 33% and 40%, my next step is to determine what's the cut-off point: what percentage is acceptable, what is marginal, and what is unacceptable so I can then create a specification around moisture and design the packaging to meet that. So I do have a question. I see moisture meters ranging from my $20 cheapo to $200 dollar units. Does anyone have those much more expensive ones, and are they that much more accurate? I get to buy one on the company's dime and I need to know that it'll be very accurate in the 30-40% moisture range. Any recommendations?
Yeah.....no idea. However, why not use a sample group of donut eaters to get their opinion, and as they take a bite, you take a reading. Or, take your reading before the bite, so as to not release any moisture from the bite. Should be some sort of correlation between engineering and technologist results. Personally, the only way I'd eat dry donuts is with some, so there's another variable to deal with. This could get interesting.............
That'll be the next phase, to correlate people's likes and dislikes to the moisture percentage. But first I need a moisture meter that I can trust.
There are a lot of different food grade moisture meters/testers that came up in a quick search but no idea of cost or accuracy. The only meters I have any experience with are my cheap Harbor Freight tester and the ones we use on the golf courses to test soil moisture on the greens.
Have you tried an ohm meter? I realize that's basically what the moisture meter is, I just thought you may have an expensive ohm meter available.
Honestly, I don't think there's really much to a MM. All you can do is treat the readings vs some sort of verified weight readings. It's kind like a dynamometer for motors. It's a relative thing. Find the sweet spot for moisture ( pun intended) and go with that. Say maybe take a dehydrated donut you put in a food dehydrator, take the weight. Then add an exact amount of water that you weighed into the donut. Take dry and moist and maybe in between readings. That could be your base. Scientific method style. Do multiple donuts on these tests. Then correlate the moisture readings of the proper good donuts so you know what should be the correct moisture. I'm available for donut testing work if you require such assistance.
If you were closer I'd take you up on the offer to help lol! As to weight loss, I've already done enough testing to determine that a dry tasting donut hasn't necessarily lost any weight, and a donut that's lost weight may still taste moist. I'm no chemist, but my thoughts are one of the ingredients in the donut mix is absorbing the available H2O so there's no weight loss, but still leaves a dry texture.
Lol, honestly I'm sick of eating donuts, I think that's part of the reason I want to take eating out of the testing! And they're always plain donuts since that's the worse case scenario. I never get to eat the white sugar or chocolate covered donuts!
