The next time you bite into a Pizza Hut pizza, a Krispy Kreme doughnut or a slice of Companion bread, ask yourself “How did this crust get so flaky?” “How did this doughnut become so light?” “How did this bread come to be so chewy?”
The answer is simple: It had help from food scientists in St. Louis.
AB Mauri is one of the world’s leading producers of yeast. The company makes Fleischmann’s Yeast, which is known to bakers everywhere, but it also makes yeast for many other purposes, from biofuels to beers and liquors.
The next time you sip your favorite scotch, ask yourself, “How did the alcohol come to be in here?”
Earlier this year, the global company moved its North American headquarters from Chesterfield to the Cortex research district off Forest Park Avenue in the Central West End. It recently held a dedication for its new baking and yeast-fermentation laboratory there.
Five thousand square feet of space are now devoted to testing everything you could possibly want to test about baked goods, more than double the space of its previous location.
At work are carefully calibrated mixers and a machine that takes round balls of dough and molds them into logs to make loaves. The lab has a big standard oven (with rotating shelves to bake the breads evenly) and a deck oven for more artisanal breads, complete with a steam injector to create a hard crust. Also in use are a deep fryer for doughnuts, a pizza oven, and space is ready for a soon-to-be-delivered tortilla press.
“That’s one of the fastest-growing segments that we have in the industry right now,” said Paul Bright, a baker and a scientist who holds the title innovation manager at the company.
The company’s reach extends well beyond yeast. It also makes the things in bread that you don’t think about when you think about bread — things like mold inhibitors, softeners, preservatives and leaveners such as baking powder and baking soda (OK, you may think about baking powder and baking soda).
Peter Krasucki, innovation manager for specialty yeast products, said, “We don’t make bread. But we make sure you can make bread with our products.”
As part of their mission, researchers develop products specifically for major companies, from restaurant chains to Bimbo Bakeries.
You don’t know Bimbo Bakeries? It makes Sara Lee products. And Thomas’ English muffins. And Entenmann’s baked goods, Arnold breads, Ball Park hot dog and hamburger buns, Boboli pizza crusts, Brownberry premium breads, Tia Rosa tortillas and more.
“A lot of our customers don’t have the equipment or the time to do the R&D,” Bright said. So the science-minded folks at AB Mauer do the testing for them and try to develop products that help create the finished product that the company wants. If the clients want bread to have a soft crumb or to stay fresh for three weeks, the food scientists determine the best way to do that.
Not long ago, they prepared a 50-page scientific paper for a national restaurant chain that was all about buns. According to Bright, all baked goods, including buns, technically begin to get stale as soon as they come out of the oven; they start to dry out and get stiffer. By putting weight on a series of buns and compressing them, the scientists could measure what is known as the staling rate of the buns. In this way, they could determine how best to slow these rates. In another part of the test, they measured how much and how quickly the buns sprang back to their original size when the weight was removed — thus scientifically determining the buns’ resilience.
It may sound like a lot of chemicals and other additives are involved, but Bright said one of the goals is to reduce the number of products that go into commercial baked goods and create cleaner, simpler labels.
Yes, it’s science. But it’s science that goes into making doughnuts, croissants, baguettes and pizzas.
“It’s a little dream world we have back here,” Bright said.
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