Reverse Engineering a Bread Formula???

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Nick Sorenson on 26 Jun 2025 at 14:58

I grew up eating a particular bakery's italian bread. It's a very simple recipe:

flour, water, lard, salt, sugar, and cake yeast

By the crumb (small bubbles much like wonderbread), I'd guess it's 58 to 60% hydration. 

Is there a good way to determine how much fat and sugar is in the bread? Can't really go by the nutrition facts since they are not accurate (same bread has different numbers over the years). I figure yeast varies by process and salt level is fairly easy to taste. So that leaves sugar and lard for the more difficult detective work. Maybe there's a way to float out the fat by using a full loaf of bread and soaking it in water? 

  • Salt should be the easiest one, 2%.  There are certain Italian breads that don't use any but this is probably not one of them.
  • Sugar - if the original doesn't taste sweet, then 2% is probably a good starting point.  Otherwise, most likely not over 6% since that would tend to reduce the baked volume and possibly slow the yeast depending on the yeast variety.
  • Lard - maybe around 2%, or if the original seems fairly soft and rich, 7-8%.  The intermediate range is said to be less desirable, and more will be hard to incorporate and is likely to reduce the dough volume and make for a very soft bread.
  • Yeast - for instant or dry yeast, 2% seems to be pretty common. For an Italian bread, they might have used a biga - pre-fermenting some of the flour with water and the yeast overnight - for more flavor.

I'm sure there will be a range of opinions coming right up!

TomP

What's the name of the bakery? You might get some information if you run an internet search for (bakery name) copycat recipe for Italian bread.

That'd be nice! But they're not that big. No copycat recipes out there other than my trying to copy this bread for decades now since I can only get it when I'm visiting family. 

I suppose the easiest way to tweak the formula for sugar and fat is the bread machine. But I was hoping for a more analytical approach. Maybe way over cooking, using water, lye, or somehow isolating ingredients (at least the fat and sugar).

Pretty uniform crumb (similar to store white bread), toasts easily (browns), soft (not quite as soft as store white bread but close). Unlike store bread, it tastes great with no preservative flavors. Has a light yeast flavor with a dough that has some age on it but not overly yeasty. Not overly salty (light on salt). Not extra sweet.

They probably make it using a biga, then, which would bring in the extra flavor you described.  Maybe 1% salt instead of 2%. A long proof for a softer, more uniform crumb. I would definitely try using a biga.

I have been experimenting with bigas and poolish (and SD starter) for this recipe for a while. I figured that's the route they took, but I asked them about it, and surprisingly they said, "no biga". 

I'd guess they were baking 20k loaves a day at their peak. So any added steps or refrigeration would probably not be ideal. 

I've speculated that they would never wash their mixing equipment and just cover it  to keep out insects, and to keep the dough residue from drying hard since one days leftovers would easily go into the next day's batch. If anything, a small amount of old dough would probably add yeast and flavor to the next batch. 

I guess at the end of the day, that's their bread. I like my bread just fine. I just miss what I grew up on and wish I could recreate it locally (400 miles away from my hometown). It was unique and the best Italian bread (in the 1910s this Italian bakery called it Vienna bread) in existence in my opinion.

Well, all right, old dough. You can do that when you're baking day after day.  A biga  is probably going to come close.

I actually like it that their bread is hard to duplicate.  It indicates that they have a unique and very evolved process.  Yay for them!

Just a guess on the dough of course. And yes! Hard to duplicate. They have something that's pretty unique and special.

We make a sourdough boule that tastes like only ours does and it's not the ingredients since nearly all regular hard white flour sourdough bread contains basically the same few ingredients. I suppose process in bread making is a very signature thing since there are so many variables.