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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Baking is a science, and cooking is an art. The have everything calculated and are as precise as possible with every step of the process
Don’t forget that if a product doesn’t meet specifications in the factory they can just throw it away to preserve the consistency of the delivered product. It could be that their profit margins are so high on bread products that they can just toss as many as they want to ensure every one looks exactly the same.
Worked in a factory bakery for a summer in high school. The others described uniformity, so let me describe the machines.
First you get a huge bowl on wheels, drive it to the flour silo and type in the amount of flour you want. After that you measure by hand the smaller amount of ingredients (salt, yeast, water…).
You drive the bowl to a big ass kitchen aid looking thing and mix them all up. When it’s properly mixed you drive it to a lift, which lifts the bowl and dumps the dough into a hopper. Dough is then sliced into 1kg (or however big your loaf is) chunks as it slowly comes out of the bottom of the hopper.
This dough chunk then goes to automatic rollers, which first make it a round ball and then roll it into a loaf and drop it into floured buckets the size of finished loaf. These buckets then go through a long conveyor belt in regulated atmosphere (humidity and temperaure right for yeast) so the dough rises. When it’s finished rising it goes straight in the oven in those same buckets and comes out perfectly baked.
For cooking you have a lot of freedom, but for baking you need to measure your ingredients exactly.
In factory bakeries this is fully automated and they also have controls in place to ensure the ingredients are always of the same quality, which also helps with being consistent.
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