From LucasNews & Press
Something Most Bakeries Are Not Measuring
I have written an opinion piece for British Baker, published on 29 September, about a variable I keep running into and almost nobody is managing: the temperature of the flour.
It is easy to think of flour as inert — a dry ingredient sitting in a silo, waiting. It is not. How warm it is when it hits the mixer changes everything that happens afterwards. Fermentation runs faster. Gluten development shifts. A recipe you dialled in perfectly during a cool spring quietly stops behaving the same way by August, and nothing in the method has changed.
If you are running a tightly timed production line, a few degrees is not a detail. It is the difference between a consistent bake and a batch you cannot sell.
What has changed is the weather. We have just had the hottest summer on record in this country, and most silo storage was specified decades ago, for a climate that no longer exists. Bakeries in England are now dealing with something producers further south have been working around for years.
In the article I look at how that is being solved at source rather than patched later — drawing flour out of the silo, bringing it down to temperature, and returning it before it ever reaches the mixer. In parts of southern Europe, where summer heat is simply a fact of the working year, the larger bakeries already run this as standard.
It connects directly to what we do in the test bakery. Whether it is a 24-hour biga, a controlled overnight ferment at five degrees, or a line turning out thousands of units a day, the principle does not change: fermentation is governed by temperature. Anything you are not controlling is controlling you.
Read the full article on British Baker: Keeping cool: how UK bakeries need to think about flour temperature control
“The weather shouldn’t be allowed to have the final say.” — Lucas Fussnegger, writing in British Baker
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does flour temperature matter in baking?
Flour temperature directly affects final dough temperature, which governs fermentation rate and gluten development. Warmer flour produces faster, less predictable fermentation, making consistency harder to hold across a production run.
How much can flour temperature vary through the year?
Flour stored in silos tracks ambient conditions, so it shifts considerably between winter and summer. In a hot spell it can reach the mixer well above the temperature the recipe was developed around.
What is a flour cooling system?
A flour cooling system draws flour from the silo, cools it, and returns it at a controlled temperature before it reaches the mixer — removing seasonal variation at source rather than compensating for it later in the process.
