Textural Characteristics of Typical Italian ’Grissino Stirato’ and ‘Rubatà’ Bread-Sticks

Stretched (“Grissino stirato”) and rolled (”Rubatà”) bread-sticks are typical Italian bakery products that are also widely produced in other EU countries. Despite their wide distribution there are no studies available on these products. Therefore, the aim of this study was to distinguish them according to their chemical composition and textural characteristics determined by a compression test using a Texture Analyser. Fifty samples (25 of each kind of bread-stick), produced by different bakers, were xamined. Variance analysis showed that the two bread-sticks only differed with respect to texture parameters. There were no differences in chemical parameters. The higher values of the maximum force and of the average puncturing force indicate that the rolled “Rubatà” bread-stick has a firmer character than the stretched “Grissino stirato” bread-stick. On the contrary, the number of spatial ruptures and the ruggedness index were higher for the stretched “Grissino stirato” bread-stick. For product authentication an Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) with a three-layer, fully interconnected, feed-forward architecture was used. ANN is an effective and powerful tool for distinguishing these products with a very high average learning (94% for rolled bread-stick and 93% for the stretched bread-stick). The model obtained can be easily used for product authentication.