Abstract
Pinsa romana (PR) is a typical elongated pizza, produced with the addition of small amount of soy and rice flours to refined soft wheat flour, which guarantee the crust crunchiness and the crumb softness. The current PR recipe asks high water content (75-80 % on flour weight) and long leavening (24 - 72 hours). Therefore, the choice of a correct flour mixture is crucial to obtain a high quality product. This paper aims at using a Response Surface Methodology approach to develop an innovative pinsa romana, optimising the proportion between different flours (semi-whole grain soft wheat, whole grain einkorn, rice, soy) and considering multiple characteristics (multi-responses). To do this, four rheological characteristics of the dough (water absorption WA, development time DT, dough stability DS, degree of softening SO) were obtained using a Brabender farinograph. Regression models were considered for WA and DT; the models showed a good adequacy, with elevated coefficient of determination (0.81 and 0.84, respectively) and low absolute average deviation (0.64 and 0.45, respectively). The optimized blend, obtained from the regression models and optimization procedure, contained 84.25 % of semi-whole grain soft wheat flour, 5% of soy flour, 2.75% of rice flour, and 8% of whole grain einkorn flour.
