MENU Retail Ordering THE PROCESS Apart from a whole load of expertise and passion, ever wondered what goes into making your favourite Brace’s loaf? Here we reveal some of our family’s best kept baking secrets… EXPLORE Great bread starts with great ingredients and, at Brace’s, we choose a particular blend of quality wheats to give us exceptional flours to create our great bread. Through experience and commitment to excellence, the Brace family and their technical team create the recipes that ensure a first-class loaf. MIXING The ingredients are brought together and the liquids added and mixed to make homogeneous dough. DIVIDING The dough is divided in a volumetric dividing machine. We continually weigh the dough pieced from the divider. As the yeast action on the dough changes the specific volume from beginning to end of the batch, the weighing unit then adjusts the divider to the correct weight of 905g of dough for an 800g loaf. INTERMEDIATE PROVING This is just a short rest period to allow the gluten strands to relax so the dough is soft and pliable. MOULDING Now the dough is relaxed, it’s rolled out in sheets and then curled up into a Swiss roll type coil. This helps in the creation of a good internal structure. FOUR PIERCING The dough roll is cut into four pieces, and each piece is turned through 90 degrees. This again helps the structure and makes the finished bread easier to butter. The dough is then dropped into the tin. PROVING This is where the dough rises. Through the action of yeast, it converts sugars into carbon dioxide, alcohol and organic acids; it takes nearly an hour to get to the right level. This creates the cellular structure in the bread that gives it that soft spongy feeling. BAKING The dough enters the oven and continues to rise for a few minutes – known as oven spring. The heat of the oven sets the dough to its final shape. There are two ways to determine a loaf is properly baked: colour, or, the hollow sound when knocking on the bottom of the loaf. We take the temperature when the bread leaves the oven and, if it hits our target of 96 degrees Celsius, then we know it’s baked. COOLING With the bread ready to be packed, it’s important that it’s cooled down to the right temperature to stop mould growth in the bag. We send it around on a big spiral conveyor until it is ready to be sliced and bagged, a process that takes about 2 hours. The bread is then placed in a basket and is finally ready to be delivered to your local store. SIGN UP TO OUR NEWSLETTER Registered address: Brace’s Bakery Limited Cambrian House, Parkway, Penyfan Industrial Estate, Crumlin, Newport, NP11 3EF Tel: 01495 241400 Fax: 01495 241479 Email: info@bracesbakery.co.uk © Brace's Bakery Limited 2021 Vacancies FAQs Privacy Policy Environmental Policy Anti-Slavery T&Cs Website by S3 Advertising