U.S. dairy ingredients help address the need for more nutritious and clean label baking.  Dairy’s breadth and depth offer enhancements for bread, cakes, cookies and other bakery applications.  The end result is finished bakery products that meet consumers demand for simpler, recognizable ingredients.

Here are a few dairy options that can simplify baking labels.

Reduce sodium while improving color, taste

U.S. permeate is known for its salty flavor characteristics, making it an ideal replacement for high-sodium ingredients. This is attractive for formulators since consumers expect simple, nutrition enhanced labels. Minimally processed permeate is a natural fit for a clean label because it is produced through the physical separation of lactose and minerals from protein and other solids from milk or whey. 

Permeate also offers baked goods natural browning for a golden crust color, a pleasant caramelized aroma, flavor enhancement, and provides minerals such as calcium and phosphorus. In the past, bakers turned to caramel food coloring and added flavors to provide a similar effect not considered clean label by today’s standards. Additional functional properties of permeate include:

• Fat-like attributes in products, allowing a reduction of fat content
• Lactose content helps retain softness, leading to better water/viscosity binding and emulsification
• Improved texture, creating moister products and a tender crumb texture

Bring back the functionality of butter

In the 1900’s, hydrogenated oils gradually replaced butter and lard as the fat source for bakery products due to the nutrition advice at the time. Today, emerging research reveals that dairy fats are actually healthy with no association between heart disease and the consumption of dairy products.¹ Butter has a range of high, medium and low melting fats that give it its unique functionality and flavor. One of butter’s best attributes is its flavor, which has been difficult to replicate in margarines or with a combination of shortening and added butter flavors.

A range of dairy products replace unwanted ingredients

For decades, dry milk and whey products have been used in baking because of their positive contributions to the end product. Here are several dairy ingredients that can improve ingredient labels in bakery:

• Whey protein concentrate (WPC) can be used to replace fat and eggs, retaining moisture and extending the shelf-life.
• Fermented skim milk, buttermilk and acid whey can help reduce staling in bread products, replacing modified food starches, emulsifiers and hydrocolloids.
• Whey protein hydrolysates can reduce hardening in protein bar applications. They can replace emulsifying salts and sugar alcohols, such as glycerol or maltitol.
• Cheese can replace modified food starch and cream cheese flavors. Natural cheese is used for its flavor and functionality, and cream cheese provides a soft, creamy texture and tart flavor to cheesecakes and cheese fillings.

U.S. dairy ingredients are a natural fit for bakery and they can help replace less recognizable ingredients ingredient labels. Dairy offers a wealth of functional benefits for the inclusion of recognizable, functional and formula enhancing ingredients to bakery items.