Our Ingredients
Our bakery products have all the core ingredients you’d expect to bake tasty bread: flour, water, yeast and salt. It’s our clever packing process that helps our delicious bread, buns and rolls retain their freshness. But just in case there’s something on the pack you’re not quite sure about, here’s a little info about our key ingredients and why we use them.
All good bread starts with the blend of wheat flours. We carefully select ours to ensure we achieve a great quality product with just the right level of bounce and the perfect flavour.
Salt not only adds flavour to bread, it also controls fermentation and improves dough structure. Too little and the bread is boring and bland. We believe we’ve got the balance just right.
Soya flour helps to improve the formation of the dough – so we can make into the shapes you’re used to. It gives our bread its great volume and keeps it nice and soft, as well as making white bread perfectly white.
Everybody hates mould, and this is the preservative we use to stop bread going to waste! Look closely and you’ll see it’s one of the most common preservatives in almost every type of bread.
A little bit of sugar makes our bread taste just right. A delicious, rounded flavour. It’s also important for yeast growth and fermentation – the process that makes bread rise!
Just the fancy, chemical name for Vitamin C, it’s really common in bakeries. We use it because it gives our finished, baked breads the perfect bounce and the specific texture we want.
Just like you might use at home when cooking, we use these oils to help make our bakery products extra soft and tasty.
Remember in science classes when you used to talk about pH levels? We use this to make sure everything’s up to scratch with our bread and keeps it top quality right up until you eat it.
After barley flour is put through a special process called malting, we can mix it with wheat flour to make an even softer type of bread. And with its deep nutty flavour, it makes our bread taste better too.
Yeast is the magic ingredient in bread baking. It’s actually a micro organism that multiplies during the fermentation process. The gas this produces makes bread rise, giving it that delicious, soft, texture.
To keep all our lovely ingredients stuck together, we use emulsifiers. They’re kind of like a glue that pulls the dough into just the right texture for baking bread.
Rye is another type of flour, just like wheat. We love it, because it has a deep, distinctive flavour that tastes amazing. It’s much heavier than wheat flour, so we combine the two together for the perfect texture and flavour.
If you just want white flour, you take wheatgerm out during the milling process. We add it back in to get extra nutrients and a deep, nutty flavour back into our bread.
Depending on the type of bread, bun or other baked product, we may include a few other ingredients too. We’re always improving our recipes for even better taste, texture and flavour, so you might find ingredients like fruits and seeds, oat, malted rye flour, wheat bran, vinegar and dextrose. They all help to make our products taste delicious – just check the label on your pack to see the exact ingredient list.
You may have noticed some of our products are now declaring new ‘may contain’ allergens.
As part of our commitment to quality products and ingredient transparency, we have reviewed our allergen risk assessments and subsequently our on-pack labelling.
This is part of an industry-wide issue affecting wheat flour at a commodity level.
In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to reduce the use of pesticides and fertilisers in the EU. This has led to an increase in crops such as mustard, soya and lupin being grown for ‘green manuring’ a more natural way of fertilizing soil. Issues affecting biodiversity, crop rotation and inter-cropping have also played a part in the growth of these crops.
Throughout the supply chain, flour producers are employing the latest techniques and technology to minimise the risk of cross-contamination of wheat with potential allergens such as mustard, lupin and soya. However, the very nature of growing crops means that it is not possible to eliminate the risk entirely.
As such, many flour millers throughout Europe have now recommended that wheat flour should be labelled accordingly.
Even though the risk is very low, St Pierre Groupe is committed to providing our consumers with as much product information as possible so they can make informed choices. We have therefore taken the decision to amend our packaging wherever this risk has been identified.
If you would like any further information, please feel free to contact us directly via enquires@stpierregroupe.com
