Premium Soft Bread and Buns – ‘The Best’
Which tools do you need to overcome the challenges of ‘artisan-style’ and ‘clean-label’ bread production?
Soft bread and buns are currently experiencing a premiumization revolution. In a trend that was first observed during the pandemic, consumers continue to ‘trade up’ their everyday purchases to replicate the restaurant experience at home. This has led to continued demand for more high-end bread options such as ‘artisan-style’ and ‘clean-label’ varieties, as well as vegan and gluten-free options. But soft bread and buns have long posed challenges to large-scale manufacturers thanks to the delicacy of their dough. Read on to find out how you can optimize your production line for premium soft bread and buns.
Overcoming the technical challenges of soft bread and bun production
Whether you’re making hamburger buns or hot dog buns, premium brioche, or dinner rolls, producing soft bread requires process and equipment adjustments for optimum results. This is because soft bread and buns have specific requirements around temperature, mixing, and handling. Take brioche, for example. This classic French dough is traditionally made with butter and eggs, meaning the dough’s temperature must remain consistent all along the production line.
Thankfully, AMF Bakery Systems has the ideal range of products to meet these requirements. Our horizontal mixers, for instance, offer numerous advantages for soft bread and bun production. The advanced glycol cooling technology in our Tilt Bowl Mixer offers optimal temperature control to ensure your premium burger buns maintain that melt-in-the-mouth crumb. And our proprietary DuraBowl™ mixing bowl technology is designed to eliminate cooling leakage, keeping your dough at the ideal temperature and consistency.
Making premium ‘clean-label’ products
‘Clean-label’ is a term for food with reduced sugar and fat content, made without the use of artificial additives. This is a growing trend with consumers, who are continuing to show a preference for healthier choices. As we all know, however, ingredients like sugar and fat can play a key role in creating the perfect taste and texture in baked products, especially soft bread and buns. To help you manage these differing requirements, AMF Bakery Systems has a top-quality solution.
Our AMF BakeTech Continuous Proofer uses filtered compressed air to achieve maximum efficiency, combined with advanced fan technology that provides 20 air changes per hour. With complete temperature control for the most uniform proofing results, the AMF BakeTech Prooferdelivers repeatable product quality for a wide range of ‘clean-label’ baked products. So, you can ensure that your ‘clean-label’ soft bread and buns meet and exceed customers’ expectations. As you know, however, there are many more technical considerations when it comes to creating the perfect soft bread and buns. Let’s explore some more techniques and solutions from our portfolio that will help make your products stand out.
Sponge and dough – for that ‘artisan-style’ taste
While the continuous mixing system is undoubtedly efficient, some consumers prefer the taste of more fermented dough in their soft bread and bun products. That’s where the ‘sponge and dough’ method comes in. It’s a two-step bread-making process in which a portion of dough, known as the ‘sponge’, is fermented over several hours. The ‘sponge’ usually contains one-half to three-quarters of the flour, all the yeast, yeast foods, and malt, as well as enough water to make a stiff dough. This ‘sponge’ is then added to the rest of the dough, and this combination creates a signature artisan-style crumb.
AMF Bakery Systems can help you implement this increasingly popular baking method. For instance, our range of efficient semi-automatic and fully automatic fermentation rooms help create the perfect ‘sponge’, giving your products that moister crumb and silkier texture.
But working with fermented dough can lead to more production-line challenges thanks to its stickiness or fragility. Often, more careful handling is needed compared with traditional continuous-mixed dough. That’s where AMF Bakery Systems’ advanced extrusion technology comes in. Extrusion is a dough-dividing process that helps maintain the integrity of even delicate or sticky dough, and with our BreadFlex new-generation extrusion divider, the process has never been simpler.
BreadFlex implements a simple, low-pressure dividing process to produce more consistent products with ultra-low shear metering, improving quality for tight and open grains. It also offers excellent scaling accuracy and improved line efficiencies, to ensure you’re getting that perfect crumb, tray after tray. As a bonus, extrusion improves the digestibility of proteins and starches and destroys the anti-nutritional factors in food. It also offers lower processing costs and saves on raw materials, labor costs, capital investment, and operating space compared with alternatives.
Moving toward premiumization with AMF Bakery Systems
If you want to try out any ‘clean-label’ or premium recipes before you invest in new equipment, we’d be delighted to invite you to our Customer Lab Services (CLS), where you can test all your recipes on our equipment, and we can help create the optimal bakery solution for you. We’ll also guide you through streamlining the testing and development process so you can meet your go-to-market goals. All while offering you reduced risk, minimized complexity, lower operational costs, and cohesive control. The future of soft bread buns is premium – give your bakery operation a boost with AMF Bakery Systems’ advanced solutions!
If you’re ready to optimize your bakery production line for premium and ‘clean-label’ soft bread and buns, book a consultation with Lex Van Houten at [email protected] today!