Improving Loaf Quality for the Industrial Baker

Baker Perkins has responded to mounting pressure on plant bakers to raise quality with a series of innovative developments in mixing and forming equipment.

These focus on achieving gentler dough handling, which is a clear path to superior bread quality and value, enabling plant bakers world-wide to combine the highest standards with economic production.

Gentle dough handling is the theme of Baker Perkins’ new product development programme.

Mixing, dividing and final moulding have all been upgraded to offer bakers improved product quality and process control, whilst retaining all the reliability and low cost of ownership benefits of the original machines.

Creating the ideal dough structure in the mixer, then carefully handling the dough through the dividing, rounding and moulding phases, preserves the integrity of the dough structure, and results in a loaf with higher consumer appeal.

Tweedy mixers, Accurist dividers and Multitex moulders set the quality benchmarks in the high-output plant baking industry.

The latest generation of machinery is the result of continual collaboration with bakers, backed by Baker Perkins’ process knowledge based on a century of involvement with the industry.

Baker Perkins mixers, dividers and moulders can be installed as integrated systems, or as stand-alone units that enhance the efficiency of an existing line.

Retrofit packages have also been introduced allowing bakers to take advantage of the latest performance enhancing developments on equipment that is not yet life expired.

Tweedy mixing

Dependable weighing of ingredients and effective mixing are essential to achieving consistent, high product quality in plant bakeries.

Baker Perkins family of mixers covers a wide end product range, and combines a century of experience in meeting the process demands of bakers with a heritage of innovation and development.

Today’s flagship Baker Perkins product is the Tweedy mixing system – a high-energy, complete production plant from ingredient weighing to delivery to the divider.   It incorporates features combining quality enhancement with cost reduction.

Pressure/vacuum mixing has made a major impact in bakeries throughout Europe, Africa and Australasia.

This gives cost saving and quality enhancing benefits including an increased yield; improved crumb colour and softness; longer shelf life; and a reduction in expensive Ascorbic Acid normally used to aid oxidation.

The majority of leading industrial bakery businesses in the UK and Ireland, Europe, Africa and Australasia specify Tweedy machines, both for new projects and as profit enhancing replacements for previous generation technology.

Accurist dividing

The new generation of Baker Perkins ‘Accurist’ dough divider – the Accurist2 - offers bakers improved product quality and process control with lower production costs, whilst retaining all the benefits of the original machine.

The key development in the Accurist2 is the introduction of servo-control to the ram movement, permitting low-pressure operation that minimises product damage and improves end-product quality.

The more gently a dough is treated, the higher the cell count – the number of micro-bubbles retained in the dough structure: the effect is to create a loaf with a finer crumb structure that is more resilient and with better colour.

Extensive production trials show that the new machine retains the consistent Accurist scaling accuracy that has set the industry standard for more than 20 years.

Key to the success of more than 600 machines at work throughout the world is maintaining a Standard Deviation (SD) of just 2.5 to 3.5 grams on an 800-gram loaf over 10,000 hours of operation, with no parts being replaced.

Intelligent control of the ram movement means that pressure on the dough can be reduced by up to 50% as it is pushed into the division box, with no loss of scaling accuracy.

Cell count increases as pressure is reduced, and trials over a range of products and weights show a consistent 10% increase in cell count.

Multitex4 moulding

The Multitex4 dough moulder is creating production cost savings that contribute significantly to a rapid return on investment.

The Multitex4 has, uniquely, four pairs of sheeting rollers – each pair has individually controlled variable gap and speed; a 2-drive machine is an option.

This arrangement improves end product quality by controlling size, shape and length-to-width ratio of the dough sheet prior to coiling.

It allows tighter coiling, with more coils, while at the same time significantly reducing stress to the dough through a more progressive thickness reduction.

Engineers and process technologists utilising bakery industry research into dough rheology identified maximising dough cell count, and reducing the dough piece as progressively as possible, as key factors which impact on bread quality.

The number of moulding rolls was clearly crucial: existing moulders had a maximum of three, so Baker Perkins decided to experiment with four, in the same size frame to allow retrofitting.

Bakers were asked for improvements they would like to see in moulder design.   Maintenance, cleaning, hygiene and dough piece centralisation headed the list.

Bakers purchasing the Multitex4 have done so after comparative tests with conventional machines in the Baker Perkins Innovation Centre.

Using their own ingredients to evaluate the benefits of the four-roll concept, they have all found that volume and cell counts increase by around 10%, and there is an improved crumb structure.

These benefits translate into better resistance to tearing; a whiter loaf; a loaf up to 18% softer; and a strong, straight sided shape that fills the tin well – particularly important for sandwich producers.

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