THE INVENTION OF SLICED BREAD - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 31

Wiley's support for their product. But it was clear that the larger public had lost any doubts it had about
bleaching. By 1930, when Scientific American introduced readers to the latest whitening agent—“Do-
White … a finely-ground powder with a pleasing leguminous taste”—nearly all commercial flour was
treated with chlorine gas, nitrogen trichloride, or nitrogen. 41 As one Iowa miller committed to un-
bleached flour complained in a letter to Wiley, the public just wouldn't buy anything that wasn't “chalky
white.” 42
This would change in a few years, as the country latched onto a new set of health fears related to
refined flour, which we'll address in the next chapter, but for the time being, dazzling white bread was
something to celebrate.
THE FINAL FRONTIER
One more great threshold of techno-scientific baking remained to be crossed, and sold to the public
as the best thing since sliced bread—one aspect of baking remained largely untransformed by science,
even as advanced machinery, precise measurements, temperature controls, and chemistry molded loaves
to assembly-line production. Until the early 1950s, even the most cutting-edge bakers still fermented
dough in much the same way as ancient Egyptians: they mixed a batch and waited for it to rise, mixed
another batch and waited for it to rise. Temperature controls and chemical yeast nutrients could speed
up batch fermentation, but dough's biological rhythm still punctuated the otherwise smooth assembly-
line flow of industrial baking. No matter how fast a baker could mix dough or speed it through ovens,
production capacity was limited by the space available for giant troughs of dough just sitting around.
Beginning in the 1920s, scientists and engineers scrambled for a way to circumvent natural ferment-
ation, but all failed. It was, in a sense, the seemingly unachievable Holy Grail of bakery science. Tech-
nology could speed up fermentation, but it was too much a part of bread's flavor and structure to avoid
altogether. Then, in 1952, John C. Baker, a chemist who first grew interested in bread while studying the
effects of chlorine gas bleaching on flour, approached the problem from a new angle. Previously, scient-
ists had worked to eliminate fermentation altogether, which was impossible, or to speed it up, which still
left bakers waiting for batches. What if, Baker speculated, instead of eliminating or speeding ferment-
ation, the microbial action of yeasts could simply be separated into its own industrial process removed
from actual baking? 43
In 1953, Dr. Baker released the first prototype assembly line based on this theory. In the Do-Maker
Process, as he called it, an independent assembly line continually produced vats of liquid ferment—a
broth of yeast, water, and yeast nutrients not unlike a French artisan bakers' preferment, or poolish . The
broth required four hours of fermentation time, but some was always on hand, ready to be injected into
an ultra-high speed mixer, where it combined with a steady stream of flour and other dry ingredients.
The result was a nonstop stream of “fermented” dough ready for panning and proofing. The Do-Maker
Process cut three hours of waiting time off every loaf. More importantly, because transferring batches
of dough required more hand labor than any other aspect of industrial baking, it reduced personnel costs
by as much as 75 percent. 44
Continuous-mix baking—or “no-time” baking, as it was dubbed—spread quickly and, like all signi-
ficant advances in bakery technology, had an immediate and dramatic effect on competition. In 1967, a
USDA study showed that astonishing growth in the productivity of large bakeries thanks to continuous-
mix technology was putting small bakeries out of business in record numbers. 45 Industrial bakeries
without capital to install expensive continuous-mix equipment simply couldn't compete.
The 1950s and early 1960s saw periods of sustained bread price spikes, so it's not clear that con-
sumers felt the benefits of cost saving and consolidation. They did like no-time bread, though. As a prob-