Scrutinizing bakery formulas

Recipes and bakery formulas need to change with the times. They need to reflect demand, and yield profit.

Recipes and bakery formulas need to change with the times. They need to reflect demand, and yield profit.


This is a break-out article from Help: The Market is Shifting


Let’s begin with the premise that there are very few recipes and formulas, save the most basic, that cannot be cleaned up yielding significant savings in one form or another.

How many of us know where the recipes and formulas we are using originated? Maybe it was from someone’s grandmother, or from a baker we worked with over the years, or something that was derived from a cookbook or a television program. How much of it has evolved over time to reflect changes in processing and difficulties we had along the way?

It remains a curious matter of human nature to me that we bakers seem to tend to think first: ‘what can we add to our formula to solve a problem?’ It doesn’t seem to be human nature to think ‘what can I take out to solve a problem’.

So, as time passes we end up with ten, twenty, even forty ingredients in a product and we aren’t even sure what they are or what they are doing there in some cases. Nothing I write here should be misconstrued as impugning the reputations of ingredient salespeople as the vast majority I have worked with over the years are decent and helpful people who are generally an asset and not a tax. However, many will concede that the time they can spend sorting out a difficult problem is limited, their experience may be specific to their ingredients but they don’t have vast knowledge of our specific bakeries and how they run as contributing factors, and can only suggest in many cases.

It’s still up to bakers, at the end of the day, to determine what formula is balanced for the unique processing parameters of each bakery.

The cost of ingredients is not limited to what we spend on the ingredients by the pound or kilo. Other costs include, but are not limited to, limited quality, poor sales, customer complaints, products not salable duet o problems in production, etc., when ingredients are not suited for the production practices or worse are in conflict with each other.

Major Ingredients

Look at the recipe as a formula. Many bakers see “baker’s percent” on a regular basis, and the frequency lends a comfort with it, but don’t utilize the tool to its fullest value. Baker’s percent is a term for viewing many formulas by comparing the minor ingredient to a major ingredient typically flour. Some examples are listed on the next page: