The company claims that Nutrilife CCX allows manufacturers to mix doughs that are dry, extensible, highly concentrated and easy to handle in order to achieve higher baking volumes, even when used in very low dosages.
"Nutrilife CCX is designed for use in the production of short-shelf-life yeast-raised baked goods, where the need is for maximum cost-effectiveness at low dosages," said Marion Schlude, marketing manager food.
"Our aim is to provide technical advice and tailor-made solutions, so that our customers get the most appropriate ingredient for their applications."
The launch comes just as the international baking industry is becoming more demanding in terms of efficiency and performance requirements. Manufacturers are constantly looking for cost-effective ways to optimize production processes, for example by increasing the baking volume or improving the properties of dough.
Unsurprisingly therefore, world demand for enzymes is expected to rise 6.5 per cent annually to nearly $5.1 billion in 2009. According to market analyst Freedonia, specialty enzymes will continue to benefit from advances in biotechnology, facilitating new application development and expanding potential demand.
However, the nature of baking has not always made such improvements easy. The gluten quantity and quality in dough is of utmost importance for the baking result; during mixing, fermentation and baking the gluten forms a three dimensional, layered network that keeps the carbon dioxide generated by the yeast inside the dough.
The better this gluten network can develop, the more gas will be held inside the dough. However, a flour component that disturbs this network formation are the so-called pentosanes - very long chained carbohydrate molecules.
Some of these are water insoluble and others are water-soluble. Especially, the water insoluble pentosanes strongly disturb the formation of the gluten network. Cognis claims that Nutrilife CCX makes it possible to partly degrade them and create more water-soluble pentosanes.
In other words, the new enzyme helps the gluten network to develop better by keeping the gas of the yeast easier in the dough. This means more mixing tolerance, fermentation tolerance and volume.
In addition, water-soluble pentosanes can bind more water than water insoluble ones, resulting in drier dough.
Cognis says that the performance of Nutrilife CCX was evaluated in tests carried out on a variety of yeast-raised products such as bread rolls, baguettes, Turkish white bread and Vienna rolls. These showed that the same or better volume could be achieved with an enzyme dosage around ten times lower (between 10 and 30 ppm based on flour) than that of conventional pentosanases.
The enzymes are particularly suitable for use in different types of flour and with special technologies such as retarded fermentation and frozen dough, where they likewise give higher stability and better performance than standard pentosanase.
Nutrilife CCX further expands Cognis' Nutrilife range of special bakery enzyme compounds, designed for application in a wide variety of baked goods with varying shelf lives. The company, a worldwide supplier of innovative specialty chemicals and nutritional ingredients, employs about 8,100 people, and operates production sites and service centers in 30 countries.
In 2004, Cognis recorded sales of €3.07 billion.