baking management
excerpt from Baking Managment — a leading, national magazine
for the baking industry
January 2007
Automation With That Human Touch
Producing quality premium and artisan breads in large quantities is tricky. Can machines mimic the gentle touch required to produce high-quality breads?
by Sabrina Tillman, contributing editor
As the low- and no-carb trend declines in popularity, health-conscious consumers have sparked a resurgence in sales of healthful and organic breads. Originating from simple, all-natural ingredients and produced by a traditionally natural, hands-on process, premium and artisan breads can be touted as a catalyst to draw consumers back to bread.
Artisan breads remain appealing because of their typically pure, short ingredient lists and hand-molded production. However, is it plausible to produce premium and artisan breads in large quantities with a less-traditional approach?
Carol Head, owner and CEO of Oliver’s Artisan Breads in San Fernando, CA, describes an "interesting conundrum where artisan traditionally refers to a hand-made process, and yet it is ironic that there are so many equipment systems out there" for artisan bread production. Tasked with producing 4,000 units daily, Oliver’s Artisan Breads supplies par-baked, flash frozen and freshly baked boules, ficelles, batards, ciabattas, baguettes, traditional artisan loaves and custom breads to wholesale customers, grocery stores, retail stores and restaurants. Head describes production at Oliver’s as a "less equipment vulnerable", line-free process where each bread product is hand-shaped.
However, when increased through-put is required, is it possible to replace hand molding with an equipment solution that provides the gentle dough handling required to produce high-quality artisan bread?
Gentle production
Low-stress dough handling remains the vital component of effective automated premium and artisan bread systems. "Preservation of the dough structure is key, especially for artisan bread, if you want to avoid improvers," says Dieter Wolf, marketing leader at Fritsch Germany. "Treating dough as gently as possible throughout the entire process is how we preserve the light pore structure of artisan bread dough."
According to Wolf, the process of creating artisan breads typically includes a long dough guiding and setting process where the aroma, pore structure and prolonged freshness are acquired. Maintaining gentle dough handling throughout the production process proves vital. Through a method called soft processing, "all components of a production line [work] to prevent a single module from destroying what you have reached with the other 98% of your equipment," says Wolf. Gentle dough handling is important not only in the dough rolling stage, but also in the shaping stage.
"A piece of machinery can only truly claim to be called ‘gentle’ if a circular dough shape really remains circular, if no compression or stretching occurs at interfaces and if the transfer from conveyor to conveyor is made virtually without stretching or imposing any mechanical load," he adds.
The soft processing procedure includes pre-portioning system divides the dough into regular batches in a row and the dough sheet former moulds the batches into a continuous dough sheet with a minimum of pressing and pulling. Then, the satellite head gently reduces the dough sheet nearly to the final desired dough thickness as the spiral cross roller reduces the lengthwise tension in the dough until the final width of the dough sheet is reached.
Tension in the dough is avoided because there are no falling heights to add pressure to the dough. If little dough thickness is required, as in the production of foccacia, the proper dough thickness is achieved by way of a calibrating head.
