New trends in the cereal industry deal with the persistent need to develop new food goods tailored to consumer requirements and, in the near future, to the scarcity of food resources. Concepts of sustainable food production and food products as health and wellness promoters, the use of organic ingredients such as new ancient cereals to produce redesigned old staple foods, or the use of byproducts in designed food or feed formulations, in accordance with the bioeconomy and sustainability principles, are current topics that act as driving forces for innovation. The structure of cereal-based food products, especially in the case of gluten- or wheat-free foods, has proven to be a determinant for food appeal and strongly impacts consumer acceptance. It is well known that products with the same chemical composition can present very different structures, resulting in differently perceived texture and sensory properties and, therefore, rheology is an important tool for the food cereal industries. These are topics that act as driving forces for innovation and will be discussed in the present Special Issue.

Cereal chemists are interested in rheology because the dough undergoes some type of deformation in every phase of the conversion of flour into baked products. During mixing, dough is subjected to extreme deformations, many that exceed the rupture limit; during fermentation, the deformations are much smaller and therefore exhibit a different set of rheological properties; during sheeting and molding, deformations are at an intermediate level; and, finally, during proofing and baking, the dough is subjected to a range of deformations at varying temperatures. Accordingly, the application of rheological concepts to explain the behavior of dough seems a natural requirement of research on the interrelationships among flour constituents, added ingredients, process parameters, and the required characteristics of the final baked product. At any moment in the baking process, the rheological behavior, that is, the nature of the deformation, exhibited by a specific dough derives from the applied stress and how long the stress is maintained. The resulting deformation may be simple, such as pure viscous flow or elastic deformation, and therefore easy to define precisely. Moreover, under some conditions of stress and time (i. e. , shear rate), doughs behave as ideal materials and their behavior follows theory derived from fundamental concepts. Under usual conditions encountered in baking, however, the rheological behavior is far from ideal; shear rates vary widely and sample size and dimensions are ill-defined.

The second edition of this fascinating work examines the concepts needed to characterize rheological behavior of fluid and semisolid foods. It also looks at how to use various ingredients to develop desirable flow properties in fluid foods as well as structure in gelled systems. It covers the crucially important application of rheology to sensory assessment and swallowing, as well as the way it can be applied to handling and processing foods. All the chapters have been updated to help readers better understand the importance rheological properties play in food science and utilize these properties to characterize food.

New trends in the cereal industry deal with the persistent need to develop new food goods tailored to consumer requirements and, in the near future, to the scarcity of food resources. Concepts of sustainable food production and food products as health and wellness promoters, the use of organic ingredients such as new ancient cereals to produce redesigned old staple foods, or the use of byproducts in designed food or feed formulations, in accordance with the bioeconomy and sustainability principles, are current topics that act as driving forces for innovation. The structure of cereal-based food products, especially in the case of gluten- or wheat-free foods, has proven to be a determinant for food appeal and strongly impacts consumer acceptance. It is well known that products with the same chemical composition can present very different structures, resulting in differently perceived texture and sensory properties and, therefore, rheology is an important tool for the food cereal industries. These are topics that act as driving forces for innovation and will be discussed in the present Special Issue.

This revised third edition of Rheology of Fluid, Semisolid, and Solid Foods includes the following important additions: · A section on microstructure · Discussion of the quantitative characterization of nanometer-scale milk protein fibrils in terms of persistence and contour length. · A phase diagram of a colloidal glass of hard spheres and its relationship to milk protein dispersions · Microrheology, including detailed descriptions of single particle and multi-particle microrheological measurements · Diffusive Wave Spectroscopy · Correlation of Bostwick consistometer data with property-based dimensionless groups · A section on the effect of calcium on the morphology and functionality of whey protein nanometer-scale fibrils · Discussion of how tribology and rheology can be used for the sensory perception of foods

The field of rheology of foods is extensive and a researcher in the field is called upon to interact with a diverse group of scientists and engineers. In arranging this symposium for the AIChE meeting in Chicago in November 1990 the papers were carefully selected to highlight this diversity. All but two of the chapters in this book are based on papers which were presented at this symposium, the additional paper was presented at the Conference on Food Engineering, Chicago, March 1991, and the book opens with an introductory overview. All the papers are peer–reviewed research contributions. The chapters cover a range of applications of food rheology to such areas as food texture, stability, and processing. This volume will be a reference source for workers within this wide and varied field.