Artisan Breads

How Our Bread Is Made

Click here to view a day
in the life of ACE bread.

Artisan breads are a labour of love, made by time-honoured, European-inspired traditions. Although the ingredients couldn’t be simpler (flour, water, yeast and salt), the process of creating superior bread is long and fairly complex.

A day at ACE Bakery begins as early as 3 a.m. when the mixer arrives to weigh the ingredients and mix the dough. Several ACE recipes call for a “sour starter,” a fermented mixture of water, unbleached white wheat flour and whole grain wheat flour that flavours the bread and provides a natural preservative. The mixer must keep this mixture alive by “feeding” it daily. Other breads use pâte fermentée, biga or poolish as starters.

When the dough is mixed, the baker divides the dough into batches and sets it aside for several hours for the process called “fermentation.” The baker then divides the dough, shapes it into loaves and again sets it aside for several hours to proof.

Bakers monitor the proofing, score the loaves with marks to identify the type of bread and primarily bake them in stone-deck ovens. After baking, the fresh loaves are cooled, packed and delivered. Late in the day, the night mixer starts the lunch and dinner bakes and the baking ritual begins again.

The process of preparing a loaf of bread for baking can take in excess of 12 hours. But the results make it worthwhile—a tantalizing aroma, a crispy golden crust, a rich, flavourful taste, and a moist, chewy texture.

Some of our bread is par-baked

Some of our customers are too far from the bakery to receive fresh deliveries. In order to provide them with our bread without compromising the quality, we developed partially-baked breads. These breads are made with the same care and quality, but we take them out of the oven when they are 85% baked and freeze them instantly. The stores then complete the baking process so you can have freshly baked ACE bread no matter where you are in Canada, the U.S. or as far away as the Bahamas.

We use only the best ingredients

One of the nicest things about artisan baking is that the same elements that give our bread its wonderful taste and texture, also make it a healthy choice.

You can be sure that ACE Bakery breads contain only the finest, simplest ingredients, natural starters and absolutely no preservatives.

• ACE Bakery ingredients are chosen for specific characteristics required to produce the finest quality breads. The building block and primary ingredient of the majority of our bread is unbleached wheat flour.
• Unbleached flour is what gives ACE bread a “crumb” colour that looks more natural and more wholesome. Using bleached flour is common in many other bakeries and that’s what gives many breads their super-white appearance. The addition of bleaching agents removes the natural yellow colour (carotenoids) from the flour and changes the nutritional value of the resulting flour.
• ACE Bakery uses fresh yeast and, because of ACE’s slow fermentation process, the amount of yeast used is considerably less than other commercially prepared breads.
• ACE uses starter to leaven its bread products. The starter is a combination of flour, water and yeast that is mixed in different quantities to produce a number of different starters.

See also:

Artisan Bread