UNDER-WEIGHT

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22200, 17 September 1937, Page 10

UNDER-WEIGHT

BREAD “Bakers Often Not To Blame” RESULTS OF EXPERIMENTS REPORTED “The mere weighing of loaves of bread as a means of preventing fraudulent light-weight is crude, is often unfair to the baker, and has so many disadvantages that some better means tp that end should be adopted,” ran an extract from the report of the Director (Dr. F. W. Hilsendorf), which was submitted to the quarterly meeting of the Wheat Research Institute, yesterday. It was stated by Dr. Hilgendorf that when bread was underweight it was usually because it had lost more water than was expected during baking. It was very rarely, if ever, because it contained too little flour or other solid ingredients. To see if a more satisfactory method than the weighing a* loaves could be devised, a trial was made at the institute with two-pound loaves. Equal weights of the same flour were mixed with different quantities of water, and were baked for different lengths of time. The loaves baked were found to vary greatly in weight although they all contained the same weight of the useful constituents—-flour, yeast, salt, and sugar. The loaves were then sliced, dried and ground into a coarse meal. The meal was then sampled and the moisture determined, so that the weight of dry matter in the loaf could be calculated. It was found that the dry matter weighed the same no matter what the loaf weighed. Legal Testing Methods It was thus clear, said Dr. Hilgendorf, that the weight of the solids in a loaf was a much better criterion of its real value than the net weight was, and it was hoped that the procedure for the legal testing ofthe weight of loaves might be modified. In the detailed notes of the institute’s experiments which were appended to the director’s report, it was stated that the amount of overweight which could be allowed in baking was strictly limited by economic considerations, and to be in a position of guaranteeing that every loaf produced would be full weight, it would be necessary to exceed this limit, much of the bread would be overweight, and the consumer would prpfit at the expense of the baker. After outlining some of the factors which influenced loss of weight during and after baking, the report stated: —“It is little wonder, therefore, that bakers are occasionally caught with short-weight bread, and it is a fact that very seldom, indeed, is this due to a deliberate attempt to fraud. It is clear that weighing the whole loaf weighs not only the solids, which are useful, but also the water, which is relatively useless, and that usually when a loaf is light-weight it is because this useless water has evaporated out. Yet the baker may be fined because of the absence of this worthless water. “It is even possible that a baker, using a very slack dough, or underbaking his bread, would thereby keep up the weight of water and therefore escape a fine, although he thus made bread of poor quality, while another baker making good bread would be fined. It is wrong that the weight of a loaf should be judged on the weight cf a worthless and often deleterious ingredient.” In a shoi’t discussion it was mentioned that the matter would be brought under the noth 3 of the Standards Institute, which had been considering the standardisation of the quality of bread.