Bakery Fats

Bakery shortenings are the fats that are used by bakers to make bakery items like biscuits, cakes, puffs, pastries etc. These specific fats are made considering the usage / final product application. These fats are required to be pasty texture and should mix evenly with dough. This should also help in shortening the gluten length & the final product in attaining the desired quality. In bakery products, one of the main requirements is that the fat, be it a dough fat, pastry fat or cream fat, should have some structure and solidity. Without the use of hydrogenation, this can only be achieved by using oils such as palm oil, palm kernel oil and coconut oil. Of these palm oil is the most important and the most versatile. Specialty fats are made to suit special applications and products of different users to make the puffs, pastries, cakes, biscuits, cookies etc.

A good quality bakery shortening must be able to release flavour slowly and impart creamy sensation. Bakery fats provide good crumb structure and improve volume in bread, pastries and other bakery products. Companies, today, offer a wide range of quality products like shortening, margarine, confectionery, ice cream and bakery fats. Bakery fats include cbs, cbr, cbe, hydrogenated palm oil/palm kernel oil, hydrogenated palm kernel olein, refined palm oil/olein, super refined palm olein, refined coconut oil, rumen bypass feed and various other fats. Margarines are widely used in the production of bakery and flour-based confectionery products because of their versatility and relatively low cost. Margarines have great potential for use in functional foods, as it is possible to modify the fat phase and include non-fat components with the required properties in formulations. In the past, there were only all purpose margarines or fats for the bakery applications. In order to give more convenience and to get a better baking result, dedicated bakery margarines have been developed for the various applications: cream, cake, biscuits, bread, short pastry, croissant or danish pastry, and puff pastry.