Brian Strouts: Baking without Trans Fats
What a difference five years makes. In the spring of 2000, the American Institute of Baking organized a baking-industry seminar on eliminating trans fats. "We could barely get anybody here," recalls Brian Strouts, head of experimental baking for the Manhattan, Kansas, institute. "The interest just wasn't there, and the fat companies were behind the curve. There weren't a lot of alternatives."
Today, says Strouts, most of the large wholesale bakeries have modified their formulas to take the trans fats out. With looming regulations requiring food labels to declare trans fats, manufacturers see these unhealthful hydrogenated fats as a competitive disadvantage. "More and more companies are sensitive to how consumers are going to view their product," says Strouts.
For bread bakers, the fix was relatively easy, he says. Soybean oil has proved not only a functionally acceptable substitute for hydrogenated shortening; it's an easier product to use in bread.
With the new generation of solid shortenings with low or no trans fats, manufacturers have also achieved successful reformulations of most cakes, cookies, brownies, and crackers.
The biggest technical challenges now, says Strouts, are twofold:
- * In the fryer: Using low- and no-trans fat shortenings as a frying medium for doughnuts has been problematic. "You lose a lot of quality very quickly," he says. "You get poor doughnut formation, and absorption is high."
- In items with rolled-in fat: When making puff pastry, Danish, croissants, and some pie doughs—wherever a flaky result depends on maintaining the integrity of the fat flake—the modified solid fats have underperformed. "If you manipulated the temperature of that roll-in fat by refrigerating it, you got much better performance," says Strouts. "But to use it at bakery production temperatures, it melts right into the dough."
For most bakery products, there are good solutions to the trans fat problem, says Strouts. Cost may be an issue with some of these modified shortenings, he acknowledges, but an even bigger short-term hurdle may be supply. With so many food manufacturers reformulating products, there may not be enough of the new fats to go around.