The perfect loaf? Scientists quest for better-for-you bread, cutting sodium and boosting fiber

12 Feb 2020 --- Bringing industry another step closer to commercially viable, sodium-reduced bread, Canadian researchers have found that although reducing salt can lead to a stickier dough, optimized water, wheat cultivar and mixing techniques can help mitigate this. These revelations come at the heels of a breakthrough in high-fiber white bread, meaning that substantially healthier loaves that maintain their desirable characteristics could soon be within grasp.

Clean label bread formulation is in the spotlight as health and wellness trends dominate the bakery space. Demand for healthy indulgence is growing and innovation is geared toward fiber enrichment and cutting salt without impacting functionality and ultimately taste. 

Indeed, high fiber white bread could be on supermarket shelves by 2025, according to an international group of scientists led by Rothamsted Research and the John Innes Centre, in the UK, who have successfully opened the door to healthier white bread, after they pinpointed genes responsible for the dietary fiber content of flour. 

Research on sodium-reduction may help make bread more appealing to consumers.Now, Canadian scientists are joining the cause toward healthier bread formulation with new research exploring how reduced sodium in bakery products affects the billions of tiny bubbles that help make bread such appealing food. 

“The key to commercially produced bread is the crumb or texture that is created by an even distribution of uniform-sized bubbles throughout the dough,” says Dr. Filiz Koksel, Assistant Professor of Food and Nutritional Sciences at the University of Manitoba (UM). Consumers of commercial bread value consistency, meaning no big holes. In contrast, bakers of artisan bread, like French baguettes strive for bubbles of varying size. Bubbles are an important consideration given bread can be up to 80 percent air by volume. 

The researchers prepared simple non-yeast doughs to assess how varying salt content affects bubble formation and dough-handling properties. They created a wide range of samples using two different wheat cultivars popular in breadmaking, various water and salt contents, and a number of dough-mixing times. 

Results were measured using the Canadian Light Source (CLS) synchrotron. Then the X-ray microtomography recorded real-time changes in the bubble size and distribution in the samples. Using the non-destructive X-ray technique was critical to the study, said Koksel, because the delicate bubble structures would be destroyed if the samples were cut open for observation.

The scientists found that there were also fewer bubbles in the dough samples prepared using stronger wheat cultivars, higher water contents and shorter mixing times. Reduced salt also created a stickier dough, which has implications in large-scale processing when dough sticks to machinery. 

Sodium reduction and clean label are on-trend in the bakery sector.“During mixing, three critically important tasks are taking place,” Koksel explains. “First, mixing blends and hydrates the ingredients. It’s also critical to developing gluten proteins in the wheat and to incorporating air bubbles into the dough. Mixing also affects the dough handling properties. Reducing sodium can end with a good result if water, the wheat cultivar and mixing are all optimized.”

Additional changes to bread formulations such as increasing fiber or reducing other additives will require similar evaluations, she says. “This is because with each change we’re facing new processing and product quality challenges.” 

Aiding sodium reduction
This latest research stems from Health Canada’s recommendations that Canadians reduce the amount of sodium in their diets, following its findings that bread products are responsible for about 30 percent of excess sodium consumption. Drives to reduce sodium are similar around the world. 

Sodium reduction has remained a consistent theme across new product launches over the past five years, according to data from Innova Market Insights. However, consumers are also looking for clean label products, which may rule out some substitutions that have shown success in reducing sodium, such as monosodium glutamate (MSG).

High sodium intake has been linked to several adverse health effects such as high blood pressure, hypertension, heart disease and stroke. The 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend that they consume less than 2,300 mg of sodium per day as part of a healthy eating pattern, but about 90 percent are still consuming too much. 

By Missy Green