How do commercial bread makers like Sara Lee and Pepperidge Farm get their loaves to turn out in a uniform size and shape every time?
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I worked in a bread factory one summer in college. The dough is made in large vats, those vats sit in a rising room for the proper amount of time(this was a dangerous room as CO2 is emitted from the rising process, so you had to be quick rolling the vats out to avoid breathing too much CO2 and passing out), when done rising those vats are fed into a machine that measures and rolls the dough into the proper form and drops it into the pans. The pans ride a conveyer through the oven (timed to cook perfectly), bread is dumped out of the pans by machine, the pans are stacked, the bread rides a conveyer designed to be long enough, so it is cool when it reaches the slicer/bagger,(slicer is just a bunch of band saws, air blows open bag and bread is pushed in), fed into plastic trays which are then stack and ride the conveyer where it is pulled from and loaded onto trucks for shipping. The worst job I had was the pan unstacking machine, because the pans were typically still hot from the last batch and would sometimes get stuck, so you’d have to manually break them apart, of course you would get burnt if your arm accidentally hit the pans. I spent one day breaking apart raisins by hand, opening 20lb boxes dumping them in vat the separating all the raisins so they didn’t stick together and could be added to the dough. Where we worked the hamburger bun bagging machine the bread cooling line would run overhead and sometimes, we could snag a loaf of raisin bread to eat.
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