DuPont targets shelf life of parbaked bread

04-Jul-2012 - Last updated on 05-Jul-2012 at 10:53 GMT

DuPont Nutrition & Health has launched a collection of ingredient solutions to keep parbaked bread fresher for longer.

DuPont Danisco enzymes has introduced a solution using lecithin to help bakers attain thin, tender crusts with longer-lasting crispness after the final bake-off. The company said this enabled the industry to overcome common crust defects, such as the hard brittleness of white bread or the leathery toughness of fibre bread.

“A rapidly deteriorating crust will result in a lot of unsold bread. Our aim is to extend the visual appeal and eating quality so bake-off outlets can increase their sales and reduce waste,” said Frank Schuhmann, bakery application specialist.

Successful trials had also been achieved with a solution aimed at extending the shelf life of bread stored at ambient temperature after initial parbaking, said DuPont. Its POWERFresh Bread 9740 and DIMODAN HP 45 were able to maintain a soft, moist crumb with optimum resilience for up to 20 days.

Complex processing challenges

“Parbaked bread involves quite different and complex processing challenges compared to conventional bread production,” said Schuhmann. “While extending shelf life we have to maintain the bread’s appearance, stability and volume right through to and beyond the second baking. These are requirements that our package of parbaked solutions also tackle.”

Annual EU sales growth for parbaked bread is tipped to reach 4.5% up to 2014, according to DuPont, citing global market research Gira.

Parkbaking is a cooking technique in which a bread or dough product is partially baked and then rapidly frozen for storage. The raw dough is baked as if normal, but halted at about 80% of the normal cooking time, when it is rapidly cooled and frozen. The partial cooking kills the yeast in the bread mixture so that the product is essentially cooked on the inside. However, it stops short of generating desirable external qualities such as a crust, which are difficult to preserve once fully cooked.

Such products do not age or become stale, as a fully baked loaf of bread does. When the final bread product is desired, the parbaked loaf is ‘finished off’ by baking at normal temperatures for an additional 10-15 minutes.