Mechanisms of Water Redistribution and Gluten Network Damage in Repeatedly Frozen and Thawed Dough
Keywords:
frozen dough; water redistribution; gluten network; freeze-thaw cycling; ice recrystallization; cryoprotective systems; cold-chain infrastructure; system resilienceAbstract
Repeated freeze-thaw cycling in wheat dough is a coupled biophysical failure process in which water redistribution and gluten network degradation interact across molecular, microstructural, and macroscopic scales. This paper develops a system-level account of these mechanisms by treating frozen dough as a multiscale infrastructure whose stability depends on the coordination of thermal transport, phase separation, water mobility, and protein network integrity. Ice nucleation and growth are shown to operate as disruptive architectural events that extract water from the hydrated gluten matrix, concentrate solutes, and generate mechanical stress at the ice-protein interface. The gluten network responds not as a homogeneous material but as a hierarchical system of covalent and noncovalent interactions, and repeated cycling progressively weakens this architecture through ice recrystallization, moisture migration, and local rheological failure. The analysis highlights the structural trade-offs among ice suppression, dough rheology, gas retention, and additive-based stabilization, and situates frozen dough quality within broader cold-chain governance, monitoring, and sustainability concerns. By connecting mechanisms of failure to infrastructure design, the paper argues that improvements in frozen dough robustness require coordinated interventions across formulation, thermal logistics, sensing, and policy rather than isolated material solutions.
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This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
