Quality assessment of traditional breads in Gonabad bakeries, Iran

Bread, as a main food of most people around the world, provides major part of energy, protein, and essential vitamins. So, health and quality of consumable bread would be very important. The aim of this study was to assess quality of taftoon bread which was produced in taftoon bakeries in Gonabad, Iran. We applied a cross-sectional descriptive study on 140 taftoon breads which were selected by two-stage cluster sampling and assessed their bacterial and fungal contaminations, value of PH, and percentage of salt. The data were gathered using a checklist and were analyzed. Our findings showed no bacterial contamination in the sample, while there was 9.3% fungal contamination in the baked breads which was the standard range. Mean (standard deviation) of PH and percentage of salt was 5.92 (0.214) and 1.30 (0.547), respectively. The value of PH in 77.1 % of the breads was into standard interval and percentage of salt in only 7.1% of the breads was more than standard measure. According to our results, 28.6% of the taftoon breads in Gonabad bakeries were unqualified. Our results indicated current situation in production of taftoon bread in Gonabad and would be used by inspectors who supervised the bakeries.