Student Resource Centre

Bread and Flour Facts

Flour is a key ingredient in the production of bread; there are four main ingredients that are required to make bread, which include, flour, salt, yeast and water.
Other ingredients can be added to the recipe depending on the process used and the type of final product that is required. These additional ingredients include fat, milk powder, improver, soya flour, sugar, seeds, flavours and malted flake.
Bread production is a complex sequence of operations sensitive to ingredient, temperature and processing changes.

The Methods

There are many methods that can be used to produce bread, including fermentation, where ingredients are subjected to long fermentation as the means by which the dough is developed.
Mechanical Dough Development, where the ingredients are subjected to very intense mechanical mixing, thus to help the dough develop.
Activated Dough Development, in which an improver is added to the other ingredients in order to develop the dough in a shorter time.

The Processes

The fermentation process was used considerably throughout the UK to produce bread up until the mid 1960’s when its use declined in favour of shorter time processes.
These processes included the Chorleywood Bread Process (CBP) and Activated Dough Development (ADD) methods that allowed the production of bread to be reduced from about five hours and more to just over two hours. These processes also saved bakeries space as the dough could be processed immediately and did not have to ferment in large bowls.

Bread back in the day!

Bread has been around for thousands of years, although not in the form we know today. It is one of the oldest foods known to man, and its main ingredient wheat, was first grown in the Middle East over 8,500 years ago.
During the Stone Age, grains of wild grass were crushed between two stones by hand, and the resulting meal that was produced was mixed with water to form a dough, and then baked on a stone over an open fire. This bread would have been very coarse and heavy in texture.
The first use of yeast was probably by accident during Egyptian times, where wheat was ground using a pestle and mortar, to make flour. Milk honey and dried fruit would have been added to make a dough and then baked on stones in the sun. Due to the length of time it took to bake this bread, it is thought that natural fermentation from yeast naturally present in the air and flour, had time to occur, and the resulting bread was more open in texture and lighter to eat.

How it developed to the bread we eat today….

The Romans progressed bread making further by concentrating on the milling of the main ingredient, flour. They developed rotary motion to milling, which was grinding wheat between two large stones, one rotating and one stationary. They further developed the quality of meal achieved by adjusting the width between the stones. Slaves and donkey or oxen would have been used work the larger mills. This flour would have then been sifted and this would have produced a lighter flour and more open texture in the bread.
Roman bread would generally be circular in shape with a hole in the centre. This was due to the vast empire the Romans had created, and the travelling distances Armies had to march. The hole in the centre meant that the bread could be transported on large sticks, easily, or tied to the waist using rope.
During the Tudors age, bread had become a staple part of the diet, with Nobles eating white loaves, and the poor eating the bran, and left over parts of the wheat. Although the poor appeared to be worse off, they were in fact eating the most nutritious part of the wheat, and were relatively healthy!
Georgian times saw the improvement of agriculture and the mining of Tin in Cornwall that was used to make tins. Bread was then baked in tins, and the resulting loaf was more like the ones that are around today.
This ‘new’ form of bread could be sliced and toasted, and it was at this time when the Earl of Sandwich invented the Sandwich when he requested his dinner be served between two slices of bread.
The milling process today in the UK is one of the most modern and efficient in Europe. Rather than wheat being milled between two stones, it is milled using steel roller mills, and the consistency achieved is excellent.
There are many different grades available for each process used, be it Bulk Fermentation, Activated Dough Development or Mechanical Dough Development.
Did you know that Rank Hovis mills well over 300 different grades of flour!