Altered states
People often talk of the Chorleywood Bread Process (CBP) as if it marked the technological end-point of breadmaking history.
Not a bit of it. The current challenges facing plant bakers are arguably greater than when the CBP emerged in the 1960s.
As engineers pick sticky lower-salt doughs out of their hairnets and strive for solutions to process them at breakneck speeds, radical new processes are in development.
Not only salt reduction, but energy, raw materials (cost, quality and availability) and process control are up the agenda of change. And what if a research by-product finds a way to make crusts the new superfood? All the better!
Studies are underway that could not only change the process of forming doughs, but also open the door to using lower protein flours, which are cheaper. The composite dough technology (CDT) project at Campden BRI food research institute points to a future where bread is formed of high-quality flour on the inside and low-quality on the outside. Think of the loaf as a gourmet meaty sausage wrapped in a slice of value ham, minus the gag reflex. Only the results are more palatable with bread, because 'quality' here refers to the strength of the flour's baking properties rather than taste.
While the brawny hod-carrying inner dough does all the structural work, the low-protein weakling riding its back freeloads its way through the baking process, and the consumer's none the wiser, so the theory goes. "CDT came out of a research project in which we were looking to influence the texture of the loaf of bread by using different types of dough in different parts of the bread," explains Simon Penson, head of Campden BRI's cereals and milling department.
"We tried less functional flours in some parts and good quality flours in other parts to see if we could modify texture. As we were putting the less functional or lower quality flour around the outside of the bread we saw that the structure of the bread is really determined by 3040% of what's in the middle. You don't have a lot of structure around the edge of the bread. We realised you could use a non-functional dough as a wrap around the central core of a good functional dough and still get a reasonable quality slice out of it."
With that initial breakthrough in mind, a major benefit could be reducing salt levels in bread. "If you don't need any functionality in the outer piece of the dough, then you could have almost no salt in that outer piece and just have the conventional salt content in the middle," he adds. "So you'd still get the flavour but the salt content would be reduced overall. Now, it can be done technically, but it would take some thinking about how to rejig bakery lines."
Eat your crusts
One further possible application of this method harks back to the age-old motherly edict to eat one's crusts. A lot of the bran goodness that kids shy from could be concentrated in the crust, leaving standard white bread at the core a novel spin on the so-called wholewhite bread category, which soared by over 20% last year (Kantar Worldpanel 52 w/e Jul 8 2012).
"Let's say you wanted to have the eating characteristics of a white sliced loaf of bread but with the bran: you could perhaps have the bran in the outer part of the slice provided you don't cut off the crusts! The benefit of that fibre content would be in that slice, but the central piece which gives the eating quality would essentially be white bread," says Penson.
There is also an argument on sustainability grounds of pumping less nitrogen onto the ground when farming breadmaking wheat, he claims: "This is quite preliminary work so it needs optimisation, but there's a potential sustainability benefit around using a lower protein flour. To get the high nitrogen contents you need for breadmaking quality grain, typically you need quite a lot of nitrogen in UK agriculture. So if you can sustainably source wheat while better managing the ingredient raw material variation you inevitably get, then that could be valuable."
Of course, while lower salt and sustainability tick boxes, it's the bottom line that counts when paying back capital expenditure. There would need to be a tipping-point cost-benefit.
As UK millers push up prices again following worldwide harvest problems, the potential for using cheaper wheat becomes ever more pertinent. Here, a good sense of the savings on flour costs would be the typical 60% premium breadmaking wheat has over feed wheat, which reflects the differential in flour costs. As prices fluctuate wildly, you could look at a five-year average of what you've paid for flour to get a sense of the savings.
A rough cost-benefit analysis suggests the raw materials savings are likely to be around 1p a loaf, on the basis of a 50% substitution of feed wheat for milling wheat. Multiply that by the 8,00012,000 units an hour that plant bakeries handle and you're laughing.
Radical Bread Process
The CDT project is a research project though, so if these findings were to make their way into a manufacturing bakery, an equipment company would need to help take it to the next level and commercialise the machinery and answer these questions. That is already happening with Campden's Radical Bread Process (RBP), which has a major bakery kit maker, Rondo, on board.
The RBP is a process that uses lamination the method of layering dough in pastry production to develop the dough. It is said to achieve a uniform, even bubble distribution and is claimed to be more tolerant of variations in ingredients, potentially requiring fewer or different processing aids and additives.
A Rondo Smartline has been installed at Campden BRI to carry out the experimental work and it is well on its way to commercialisation. As far as Rondo is concerned, the RBP remains a project in progress with 18 months still left to run.
"Early tests have been extremely encouraging, with results obtained matching those achieved at Campden," confirms Richard Tearle, general manager for Rondo. "Work is continuing with further testing and development is scheduled for the remainder of this year and beyond. Until Rondo has a fully developed and tested concept to bring to market, we will not be commenting further." That is understandable, given the potential for patent challenges.
Winning team?
So are these two technologies exclusive or could we see them paired on a bread production line?
"They could work in tandem," says Penson. "Both of these technologies might enable a cleaner-label product because it's all about a greater tolerance to variations in ingredient quality. So you could achieve something that's not been achieved with existing technology. If you wanted to take the salt content down any further, this might enable that too."
New ways of distributing salt in bread baking could spark further equipment breakthroughs.
"A group in the Netherlands (Noort, MWJ, et al) has been actively looking at salt reduction in bread," explains Wayne Morley, head of food innovation at Leatherhead Food Research. "They've used doughs with different levels of salt and layered them to make alternate high- and low-salt levels in the bread. When the consumer eats that piece of bread, they detect the salt in the higher salt layer and the palate is tricked effectively into believing the whole of the product has higher salt than it really does."
Initial findings of the project, published in the Journal of Cereal Science in 2010, showed that a 28% reduction in salt was possible without a perceptible difference, using this layered approach. "If it were to be industrialised, there would need to be some developments in commercial baking technology to combine two dough streams into a process," says Morley.
Equipment cost equations are complex to balance though, and the challenges don't always boil down to technical innovation. For example, with the RBP, would an existing bakery making bread by CBP be able to squeeze a laminating line into the factory layout, or indeed several? Would they invest if it required an extension or a new bakery? And would the machinery stretch to the huge volumes made by UK plant bakeries?
There's no doubt other developments are also being investigated, some may even be more advanced than the RBP and CDT, but given the ultra-competitive, secretive nature of industrial baking, that beavering is kept away from the public domain. But are bakers too wedded to the CBP to change their set-ups?
"The launch of the Chorleywood Bread Process in 1961 showed how a thorough understanding of baking technology could develop new ways of making bread," says plant baking consultant Stan Cauvain of BakeTran, former director of Campden.
"The challenges that the UK industry face now are in some ways different to those it faced pre-1961 and in some ways similar, but they are just as significant. The industry has a long history of new developments. But for it to go forward and meet future challenges, we need to be more innovative than we have ever been."
