This makes sense that they would specialise this dough preparation, freeze it and sell it on, probably how they all work now, why bother mix, rise and prepare the dough yourself in your own bakery, if your customers aren’t asking how it got there? Don’t think I’ve ever seen a commercial dough mixer out the back of any ‘Japan oily bread’ bakery here. They are generally quite big items as mixing up dough takes some horsepower. They are bloody loud too.
Rationalising the preparation of the raw dough introduces more risk to the supply chain if only a few providers are at the top though, if one or more do something dodgy with the oil, for example they get an extra good deal on a container of ‘blended vegetable oil’ from China, that turns out to be gutter oil, then everyone is screwed.
There’s guy in my neck of the woods who makes some good bread. I’m guessing he’s a master baker of some kind. They got me to try a loaf once of their NTD200 bread. Four kinds of imported flour. It was amazingly filling but not gassy like some bakeries here when they get the yeast content wrong.
If you know the baking industry a lot is processed even before it reaches the baker, pre-mixed, additives added, dough improvers, gluten enhancers and much more. There are few baleries that mix their own flours, or use unbleached flour. It’s all too time consuming.
Personally I just prefer the old school mantou places to be honest, it’s all steamed and not so oily, at least marginally healthier. There’s a family one run near us that has been there about 20 years.
I’ll never be satisfied with any European style bakery here, don’t care how authentic it is supposed to be, crust will not be chewy enough.
The fats they use(d) are mostly palm based, hydrogenated, flavors and colors added. But fat ‘technology’ has changed over the years and some international companies make pretty OK fats, margarine, faux-butters. But I wouldn’t say the same about local about fats made by local companies.
I tend to be a bit of a Luddite when it comes to fats, if man-made bad. If naturally occurring, where some flexibility is afforded to ‘naturally occurring’, i.e did a human at some point in the history of our genome manage to eat and digest this, such as olive oil, then good.
Sure, the problem I have with hydrogenation, is that our digestive systems have never seen that extra hydrogen atom before. So to the extent that we are not creating a new ‘weird fat’, okay. Not sure if the new process you are talking about indeed does. As you can see, I’m very simple on this matter
If it’s served at school, then pretty much by definition it’s the cheapest shit on the market, which as you said is probably margarine.
FWIW margarine is no longer hydrogenated … in most countries at least. It’s a completely different process (transesterification) that involves substituting different fatty acids (naturally-occurring ones) onto the glycerol backbone. It’s completely pointless because the resulting product is chemically similar to butter, lard, and suchlike. However, it’s a) marginally cheaper to make a solid product this way b) it can be engineered to have certain properties that make it suitable for baking and c) it can be labelled “low fat”, thus attracting the approval of scientifically-illiterate politicians.
Probably to sell more of it. Your refined tastes are different from the lowest common denominator here, who have to have that little sugar kick before they’ll buy. (seriously, even in the west many, if not most people, like a little sugar in their bread)
I would wager that bakers in Taiwan have tried to take some sugar out and saw sales plummet, then go back up only when the sugar was added back.
