We recently purchased a simple pH Test Meter and I would like to know how to prepare a dry, bake mix to be tested. Is there a set weight of mix to be added to a set volume of distilled water? I've seen a few bits of information that seem to contradict one another. 5 g mix to 10 ml distilled water perhaps. Many thanks for your assistance.
Dear dan,
It's a good question. I don't recall ever seeing a "universal" preparatory method for foods, or even solid items per se.
Not my area of expertise but the nearest i could find to yr situation is the procedure below for flour taken from one of the classic texts - Pearson - chemical analysis of foods (1962).
Shake 10g or 20g of flour with 100 ml H2O and allow to stand for at least 30min. filter and determine the pH of the filtrate either visually or with a pH meter. The pH of flour usually falls within the range 6.0 -6.8. Bleaching of flour with chlorine gas causes a fall in the pH value.
I saw similar quantities used elsewhere for bread and sourdough but without filtration, maybe depends on the electrode type ?. Easy to compare i guess

.
Baking people here probably have better idea on this.
Rgds / Charles.C
PS I think some labs would automatically blend mixtures as a routine procedure.
To illustrate the complexities which can occur for other (rather different) products, can try this link -
http://www.accessdat...h.cfm?fr=114.90Note that the proportions used are sort of reversed for reasons as per the comments in (ii) presumably. Might be interesting to compare results with Pearson procedure.