Cookies and Sweet Biscuit - Making Process

Cookies and Sweet Biscuits – Making Process

The dough used in the manufacture of cookies and sweet biscuits contains large amounts of fat and sugar. They do not possess a developed gluten network and therefore not coherent under tension but have a short fracture (break easily).

Sweet biscuit dough (drier and more crumbly dough) are processed on rotary machines. The dough is compressed by a grooved roller into biscuit-shaped dies engraved on a forming roller. Surplus dough is trimmed from the surface of the latter roll by means of an oscillating knife and is returned to the feed hopper via the grooved roller. The biscuit-shaped dough pieces are extruded from the engravings in the forming roll and placed on a canvas web, which is pressed firmly against the forming roll by means of a third, rubber-covered (flexible) roll. The dough pieces thus formed are transferred from the canvas web to the oven band for baking. This method of forming permits complex and sharply defined patterns to be produced on the surface of the dough pieces. Because rotary pieces undergo relatively small changes in dimension during baking, these complex patterns are carried through to the finished product.

Cookie dough (softer) is formed into pieces ready for baking by an extrusion process. The dough is forced through dies of an appropriate size and shape by two contra rotating grooved rollers. For wire-cut cookies, the extruded dough is cut at the die face by a reciprocating wire; the disk shaped dough pieces then usually fall directly to the oven band.

For bar cookies, the dough is deposited in a series of parallel ribbons, either directly on the oven band or on a transfer web. The forming machine is then known as a rout press. These ribbons may be cut into suitable short lengths by a guillotine either before or after baking. Some filled biscuits are made by co extruding the filling inside a hollow tube formed from a short dough. Again the extruded rope may be cut into short pieces before or after baking.

Reference: “Wheat Chemistry and Technology” by Y. Pomeranz