Baking & Snack - May 2004 - 13

INFORMATION UPDATE

Reinventing Bread
Low-carb,
high-protein,
extended
shelf life -
never have
the challenges to
bread formulators
been greater.

B

read is without doubt the oldest
processed food type in existence.
Early man not only hunted but also
gathered and made porridge and
gruel by grinding and boiling the seeds of
wild grasses. One day, some spilled onto a
hot ﬂat rock, giving rise to the ﬁrst chapati.
Since that lucky accident, bread processing
has progressed through many stages, some
fortuitous and some planned, to bring us to
the current stage of bakery practice.
But bakers are not done yet. New approaches to breadmaking are continually
being explored. Some of these hark back to
an earlier time - crusty whole-wheat hearth
loaves, for example - while others take advantage of the latest advances in technology.
Several factors are responsible for these developments, including increased nutritional
awareness, changes in American lifestyle
and demand for "old-time goodness," arising in part from more acquaintance with
traditional breads from other countries.
NUTRITION
During the last quarter of the 20th century,
American consumers were bombarded with
information about healthy diets. For the most
part, the newspaper stories and television
sound bites concentrated on single components of the diet, usually gleaned from
some bit of published nutritional research.
Mandated by the Nutritional Labeling and
Education Act of 1990, federal regulations
established nutritional labeling for all processed foods. Other federal initiatives wrote
Dietary Guidelines for Americans and
introduced the Food Guide Pyramid. All
contributed to the rising consumer awareness of what is in the product.
Fat. The initial healthy-component
thrust to bakery formulating took place
in the early 1960s when information linking saturated fats and heart disease ﬁrst

appeared. As a result, animal fats (butter
and lard) acquired an unfavorable image,
and vegetable oils (corn oil seemed to be
a special favorite at the time) replaced lard
in many bread formulas. This fed the trend
toward automation, since liquid vegetable
fats could be pumped and metered automatically. Soybean oil rapidly became the
mainstay bread shortening.
Two major developments in recent years
renewed interest in dietary fats. One is the
desire to include in formulations omega-3
(also called N-3) polyunsaturated fatty acids such as linolenic acid, while the other

Fiber. In the mid-1970s, dietary ﬁber
took its turn on the stage, supported by
research showing that populations consuming diets high in ﬁber had signiﬁcantly
lower incidences of coronary heart disease
and gastrointestinal cancer, compared
with the ordinary Western world diet.
Initially, this work focused simply on the
total amount of ﬁber - those food components not broken down by digestive
enzymes (amylases, proteases) and, thus,
not absorbed in the gut. Further research
differentiated between insoluble and soluble dietary ﬁber, providing evidence that

is the need to exclude trans fatty acids,
which form during partial hydrogenation
of vegetable oils. Nutritionists and medical
researchers cast this as healthy (polyunsaturated) vs. unhealthy (trans) fats. Promotion
of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) is
still mainly a matter of media publicity.
But the coming addition of trans fatty acids
as a separate line on the nutritional label,
effective January 2006, will draw it to the
consumer's attention. This has implications
for bakery products such as cookies and
puff pastry that use plastic shortenings.

ᮡ Flowers Bakeries Group targets health-conscious
consumers with its new Nature's own Wheat 'n Soy
bread, a soft variety bread containing 4.3 g of soy
protein per slice.
FLOWERS BAKERIES GROUP

soluble dietary ﬁber can help in controlling
diabetes and hypercholesterolemia.
Dietary ﬁber is deﬁned legally for labeling purposes by the analytical method
used, the so-called Prosky method of
analysis. Recently, many researchers have
proposed that other substances found in the
diet have positive health effects even though

May 2004 / BAKERS PRODUCTION MANUAL / 13
Baking & Snack - May 2004

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