Bakeries The Source of Our Unique Wheat-Based Food, Bread
Bakeries The Source of Our Unique Wheat-Based Food, Bread
Bakeries The Source of Our Unique Wheat-Based Food, Bread
This article is a revision of the previous edition article by C. Wrigley & C.E. Walker, volume 1, pp 21–27, ã 2004, Elsevier Ltd.
Topic Highlights Bread is a generous gift of nature, a food that can be replaced by no
other. When we fall sick, our appetite for bread deserts us last of all;
and the moment we recover the appetite, we have shown a symptom
• Bread can be made in many settings including the home of recovery. Bread is suitable to every time of the day, every age of
kitchen, a small neighborhood bakery, or the large com- life, and every temperament. It improves other foods, is the father of
mercial bakery. good and bad digestion. Eaten with meat or other foods, it loses
none of its delight. It is so perfectly adapted to men that we turn our
• The baking process is similar for all bakeries, differing only
hearts to it almost as soon as we are born and never tire of it to the
in the scale and degree of automation.
hour of our death.
• Bread takes many different forms around the world with Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, eighteenth-century French
common forms including white pan bread, numerous arti- nutritionist.
san and flat breads, and even steamed bread.
• Home baking has been reinvigorated in recent decades by
the advent of the bread machine and a growing interest in Historical Perspective
artisan breads.
• Large commercial bakeries are capable of producing thou- The origins of bread making are lost in prehistory when prim-
sands of units of uniform product every hour with tight itive man discovered that the seeds of some grasses could be
computerized control over the baking process and a vast crushed, mixed with water, and heated on the fire to make an
distribution network. appetizing food. Advances came from extending man’s ability
• Smaller independent bakeries typically lack the significant to recognize the more appropriate seed species (primitive
automation of large plant bakeries and range from opera- wheats) and later to cultivate them, thus avoiding the tedium
tions where bread is made entirely from scratch by master of searching and gathering them. Later, advances involved the
bakers on the premises to those where only the final baking development of better recipes and procedures for mixing and
step is performed from frozen or par-baked products. baking. Some of these arts became the trade secrets of special-
• Old-world bakeries are still common in many areas of the ists – bakers – who produced bread in quantity, for sale to their
world, producing all products by hand daily for sale directly neighbors and beyond. Thus began the concept of the bakery, a
to the consumer. place specifically designed for the efficient production of bread
• In addition to bread, many bakeries produce all manner of in quantity.
related products from pretzels, crackers, and bagels to cook- An early type of oven is illustrated in Figure 2, the so-called
ies, cakes, and pastries. beehive oven. Shaped like an igloo as much as a beehive, this oven
is timber-fueled, with a vent in the top for smoke to exit and to
provide a draft. The stick at the right of the oven is a peel for placing
Learning Objectives
dough pieces into the oven and for removing the baked bread.
Today, all bread bakeries, small or large, follow the same basic
Introduction
procedures. The principal differences are in the scale (batch
size) and the degree of mechanization and automation. Total
Let there be bread! So reads the Latin motto of the Food and
processing time from the mixer to the consumer for commer-
Agriculture Organization (FAO), ‘Fiat Panis.’ Bread, in its many
cial pan breads can be as little as an hour or up to more than
forms, is a staple food for mankind. It may be made in the home,
16 h, depending upon the process. These basic procedures
one loaf at a time, or in a fully automated bakery, at a rate of tens
carried out in the bakery are set out in Figure 3. The steps
of thousands of loaves per hour. Bread is baked and eaten in many
involved (1–12) are described in detail in the succeeding text:
different forms – thin or thick, soft or hard, sweet or plain, and
fresh or kept for many days (Figure 1). In some languages, the 1. The most basic bread contains only flour, water, yeast
word for bread is the same as the word for food. Bread is practi- (or a natural sour-dough starter), and salt. Its demand
cally the only food known almost universally around the world, for use in bread and meat preservation caused salt to
from the most developed to the most primitive cultures, and it be one of the first items traded in antiquity.
appears on the tables of the wealthiest and the poorest alike. 2. Ingredients must be stored carefully and measured
accurately if the product is to be consistent. Home
{
Deceased. and small retail bakers may measure by volume, but
A Bakery Visit
large bakeries measure by weight, often with scales that
automatically weigh and add ingredients to the mixer. Come on a visit to a family-owned bakery of modest size. It is
3. The dough is mixed until it is homogeneous and early in the morning, because the bread must be available for
‘developed,’ meaning that it is smooth and elastic sale at the start of the retail day. Nevertheless, it is warm in here
and able to hold the gas formed during fermentation as the ovens have been turned on. First stop in the production
and baking. Large batch mixers may hold a tonne or of 680 g sandwich (‘Pullman’) loaves is a small spiral mixer
more of dough (Figure 4), but the home baker may (Figure 5) containing all the dry ingredients (flour, salt,
mix just enough for one loaf by hand. improvers, and yeast), ready for water to be added and mixing
Chemical and physical test information on the to start.
flour and dough is provided to the baker, which The resulting dough is then ‘scaled’ (divided) into 780 g
helps in adjusting the process for the particular for- pieces in a dough divider. These dough pieces (Figure 6) are
mula and for the natural variation in ingredients. The rested (‘proofed’) to allow yeast action before being put
dough temperature is monitored, and information on through the dough molder seen in the top left of Figure 6.
its characteristics is fed back to adjust the next batch. The molding process, designed to create the fine texture in the
4. Fermentation typically takes 1–4 h, though some bread, first ‘sheets’ the dough squashing all the air holes out
‘short-time’ processes take much less. The sponge- and then rolling them into a shape like a Swiss roll. These
and-dough process involves mixing and fermentation, pieces are cut into four pieces before coming out of the molder
followed by the addition of more flour and ingredi- (Figure 7). Four of these quarter-size pieces are turned 90 and
ents; thereafter, mixing resumes. placed in the bread pan for further proofing prior to baking in
5. The dough is divided into smaller pieces, taking into that same bread pan. This quartering exercise again helps to
account the amount of weight loss (about 10%) that reduce the production of holes in the loaf, contributing to the
will occur during baking, to get the final loaf weight. fine texture, appearance, and eating qualities in the bread.
Figure 3 The basic procedures carried out in the bakery.
Figure 4 (a) Horizontal dough mixers used in a commercial bakery; (a) well used and (b) the latest model. (Photograph 4b courtesy of AMF Bakery
Systems.)
338 WHEAT PROCESSING | Bakeries: The Source of Our Unique Wheat-Based Food, Bread
Figure 5 A spiral dough mixer with the dry ingredients ready for the
addition of water and mixing into dough. (Photograph by Stephen Wrigley.)
available to home-baking enthusiasts in North America. This type of large bakery is most common in major centers of
While this development will also not replace the commer- population in Westernized countries – particularly North
cial bakery, it still shows the allure of a freshly baked loaf America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand – and is charac-
from one’s own labor. terized by stiff competition and a very low profit margin.
340 WHEAT PROCESSING | Bakeries: The Source of Our Unique Wheat-Based Food, Bread
France and Germany may be exceptions, with a continuing offered by the in-store bakery, thereby satisfying local
preference for the smaller trade bakery, providing freshly demands.
baked bread to a local neighborhood. The critical contribution to the success of the in-store bak-
ery is the supply of frozen doughs or par-baked foods. These
are produced at a centrally located ‘commissary bakery’ and
The Independent ‘Scratch’ Bakery may be distributed relatively long distances. The commissary
bakery may be a large plant bakery with automated facilities to
Like the French model of a local-neighborhood bakery, this is take the baking process through to either the proof stage
the traditional type of bakery, with one or a few skilled bakers (before freezing) or the partly baked stage as par-baked (before
making a wide range of bread types for sale on-site on a scale refrigeration or freezing and transport). Recent trends favor the
much smaller than that of the plant bakery. Bread is made par-baked product for this concept. It can be stored and trans-
‘from scratch,’ that is, all basic ingredients are incorporated in ported at room temperature for up to 7 days, though some
the bakery, as distinct from recent developments such as the bakers claim shelf life of up to 2 weeks.
‘in-store’ bakery (see succeeding text) where only the final Longer storage requires cooling or freezing to extend the
stages of baking are performed. This type of bakery is often a shelf life of frozen dough to 3 weeks and of par-baked dough
family business catering for local needs and parochial prefer- up to several months if properly packaged and deep-frozen.
ences for bread types. Some ‘ethnic’ bread types are still made Frozen dough pieces are sometimes stored for much longer,
in those bakeries located in neighborhoods with many people but the freezing process damages both the yeast quality and the
from a common ancestry or country. gluten quality, so that higher levels of gluten must be used,
It thus provides a valuable local resource, even a local together with special yeast strains. There have been some
meeting place, but it may be much less efficient than the attempts to sell the frozen dough pieces directly to the home-
plant bakery in terms of the production cost per unit. In recent maker, but a substantial amount of time is still required to
decades, there has been a loss of this type of bakery, in some properly thaw, proof (raise), and bake the dough. As a result,
cases because the operators of plant bakeries have bought them the use of frozen dough has never reached predicted levels in
out in order to expand their distribution network. In North direct home sales. However, certain institutional applications,
America, the few remaining small local bakeries often produce such as frozen pizza crust disks, have been very popular in
principally cakes and pastries rather than the low-margin white some niche markets where, even when some skilled staff are
pan bread. The majority of the 1200 British in-store bakeries available, they can save on the mixing and forming stages with
(in supermarkets) are based on scratch production – not frozen their long lead times.
dough or bake-off. Some other European countries have sim-
ilar high numbers of scratch in-store bakeries (e.g., France,
Hungary, and Portugal). Old-World Bakeries
Many bakeries, both large and small, produce more than just
bread. Beyond the scope of what we would normally class as Exercises for Readers to Explore the Topic Further
‘bread’ in its widest sense, there is a wide range of specialized
bakery products. Many of them are sweet but some are savory, • There are many flour functionality tests used to determine
some are yeast leavened, but others are chemically leavened. the quality of a given flour for different baked products.
The list includes foods such as cinnamon rolls, pretzels, dough- Choose three flour functionality tests and explain what they
nuts, snack foods, bagels, and many types of cookies and measure as well as what information they provide regarding
crackers, cakes, and pastries. Bakeries differ considerably flour quality.
depending on the procedures and equipment needed for this • Gluten proteins are responsible for the unique viscoelastic
diverse array of foods. properties of developed bread dough. Identify which gluten
Some of these such as crackers and cookies are produced in fraction contributes the viscous and elastic properties,
vast quantities on very large, high-speed, automated ovens, respectively, and explain how they work together to create
whereas most of them individually involve small product viscoelasticity.
runs. An outstanding example in the high-speed class is given • Choose three countries and identify (a) the most popular
by the many types of cookies and crackers made by Mondelēz type(s) of bread consumed there and (b) which type of
International, making it the largest baking company in the bakery produces them.
United States, yet the company produces no bread.
See also: The Basics: The Grain Chain: The Route from Genes to
Future Perspectives Grain-Based Products; The Cereal Grains: Wheat: An Overview of
the Grain That Provides ‘Our Daily Bread’; Wheat Processing:
The future is likely to see the spread of larger plant-type baker- Chemistry of Cake Manufacturing; Oven Technologies; Wheat-Based
ies into the centers of population in countries where traditional Foods: Breads; Cereals: Overview of Uses: Accent on Wheat Grain;
bakeries have always been the norm. This transition will Cookies, Biscuits and Crackers: Formulation, Processing and
involve the adaptation of automation and mechanization to Characteristics; Flatbreads of the World; Sour Dough Technology.
342 WHEAT PROCESSING | Bakeries: The Source of Our Unique Wheat-Based Food, Bread
Further Reading Sluimer P (2005) Principles of Breadmaking: Functionality of Raw Materials and
Process Steps. St. Paul, MN: American Association of Cereal Chemists.
Cauvain SP (ed.) (2003) Bread Making: Improving Quality. Oxford, UK: Woodhead
Publishing.
Cauvain SP (ed.) (2012) Bread Making: Improving Quality, 2nd edn. Oxford, UK:
Woodhead Publishing.
Cauvain SP and Young LS (2008) Bakery Food Manufacture and Quality: Water Control Relevant Websites
and Effects, 2nd edn. St. Paul, MN: American Association of Cereal Chemists.
Faridi H and Faubion J (1995) Wheat End Uses around the World. St. Paul, MN: http://www.aaccnet.org – AACC International.
American Association of Cereal Chemists. http://www.aibonline.org – American Institute of Baking.
Khan K and Shewry PR (eds.) (2009) Wheat: Chemistry and Technology, 4th edn. MN, http://www.asbe.org – American Society of Baking.
USA: AACC International. http://www.australiansocietyofbaking.com.au – Australian Society of Baking.
Kulp K, Lorenz K, and Brummer J (eds.) (1995) Frozen and Refrigerated Doughs and http://www.bbga.org – Bread Baker’s Guild of America.
Batters. St. Paul, MN: American Association of Cereal Chemists. http://bsb.org.uk – British Society of Baking.
Pyler EJ (1988) Baking Science and Technology, 3rd edn. Kansas City, KS: Sosland. http://www.campdenbri.co.uk – Campden and Chorleywood Food Research
Qarooni J (1996) Flat Bread Technology. New York: Chapman and Hall. Association.
Quail K (1996) Arabic Bread Products. St. Paul, MN: American Association of Cereal http://www.grains.k-state.edu/ – Kansas State University Department of Grain Science
Chemists. and Industry.