Google scholar brings up

Alu’datt, Muhammad H., et al. "Effects of barley flour and barley protein isolate on chemical, functional, nutritional and biological properties of Pita bread." Food Hydrocolloids 26.1 (2012): 135-143. (this may be your group), with no quality characteristics for the pita bread made with the various barley fractions.

Scopus brings up

Nutritional and functional performance of high β-glucan barley flours in breadmaking: Mixed breads versus wheat breads Collar, C., Angioloni, A. 2014 Source of the European Food Research and Technology. 238 (3), pp. 459-469.

The articles from this group I have read are of high quality, and they may be helpful if contacted.

I have been studying bread- and cake-structure with X-ray computed micro tomography analysis (CAT scans at high resolution), so you get my learning curve from the past few years.

Send your samples off for external microCT analysis (but don't bother with the standard micro-CT image analysis of structure, as the older versions were pretty useless of anything apart from bone). Researchers studying dentistry and bone density use micro-CT a lot, and university-based analysis can be cheap on an hourly rate. Get scans at 2 resolutions, one hi-res at 17 um/pixel, (sample size is a 2 cm cylinder of 2 cm height at this resolution, I think), one at 4 cm diam or larger. The Ct people may need to try the filter settings to get the best resolution. Decrease analysis cost by layering up multiple pita sample discs within a single scan run.

See Lim, K. S., & Barigou, M. (2004). X-ray micro-computed tomography of cellular food products. Food Research International, 37(10), 1001-1012 for an idea of images.

For the simplest pore distribution analysis I have used freeware FOAMS MatLab add-on. Request it from Tom Shea.

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~tshea/foams/foamsintro.html

Shea, T., Houghton, B. F., Gurioli, L., Cashman, K. V., Hammer, J. E., & Hobden, B. J. (2010). Textural studies of vesicles in volcanic rocks: An integrated methodology. Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, 190(3-4), 271-289.

Volcanologists, alas, can only analysis what happens in their uncooked product (lava) from the cooked product (rock)!

Pore distribution analysis from microscopy sections is easy in FOAMS. It automatically generates great pore size distributions from 2D sections images at two resolutions. Calculate the porosity of the sample from the gas/non-gas pixel count for your entire sample, not just the slices you measure and feed this info into the FOAMS analysis.

You will readily see pore distribution differences in microCT data if they exist.

I have also measured bubble distributions in my non-wheat batters by manual bubble-counting of batter between a fixed spacer width, but this is difficult to do for wheat-based systems and doughs as they are so opaque.

Use the Fiji distribution of ImageJ freeware for image handling http://fiji.sc/Fiji. Be aware that 32-bit machines are limited to handling files of < 400 MB with ImageJ. You need to know Scale and Measure functions. I used CLAHE function of Fiji to improve the images before measuring bubble diameters on screen and exporting the results into excel. I suggest binning your data into 24 size classes that increase by a multiplicative scalar, rather than a linear or exponential scaling using Excel COUNTIF and SUMIF.

This paper gives a method to correct for size for bubbles larger than the fixed-width spacers. You want at least 400 bubbles total in 3 preparations, with two or more fields of view for each prep to get statistically valid data.

Chesterton, A. K. S., De Abreu, D. A. P., Moggridge, G. D., Sadd, P. A., & Wilson, D. I. (2013). Evolution of cake batter bubble structure and rheology during planetary mixing. Food and Bioproducts Processing, 91, 192-206.

This paper is a very good one on development of bubble distributions in bread dough. They did microCT on proving batter.

Shehzad, A., Chiron, H., Della Valle, G., Kansou, K., Ndiaye, A., & Réguerre, A. L. (2010). Porosity and stability of bread dough during proofing determined by video image analysis for different compositions and mixing conditions. Food Research International, 43(8), 1999-2005. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foodres.2010.05.019

Thank you so much for all those info. Where should I contact for sample sending and analysis? I appreciate your response at [email protected]