> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # I Went Looking for Why Bread Needs an Emulsifier. I Found a Process from 1961. - URL: https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/i-went-looking-for-why-bread-needs-an-emulsifier-i-found-a-process-from-1961/ - Published: 2026-08-17T18:31:26.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-17T18:31:25.000Z - Description: I started with a small question about the emulsifiers on a supermarket loaf and ended up at a 1961 British process that replaces three hours of fermentation with eleven watt-hours of mixing energy. Almost every additive on that label is the bill for the missing time. - Author: Luke Nicholas - Tags: bread, food labelling, Emulsifiers, Baking, wheat, Additives I was reading the back of a supermarket loaf, which is what you do once you have started baking your own, [bought a grain mill](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/why-i-bought-a-grain-mill-and-what-i-learned-about-sourcing-wheat-in-new-zealand/), and become slightly insufferable about it. Wheat flour. Water. Baker's yeast. Iodised salt. Vegetable oil. Soy flour. Acidity regulator (263). Emulsifiers (481, 472e). Vitamin (folic acid). Processing aid (wheat). Seven hundred grams, seventeen slices and two crusts. Made in New Zealand. No preservative declared, which surprised me. My own bread is flour, water, salt and a starter I keep in a jar. So the question I had was small and specific. What is the emulsifier doing? Bread is not mayonnaise. There is nothing in a loaf that needs oil and water held together. The answer, it turns out, has almost nothing to do with the emulsifier. It has to do with time. ## The answer is a process, not an ingredient In 1961, three researchers at the British Baking Industries Research Association in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, worked out how to make bread without waiting for it. Bill Collins, George Elton and Norman Chamberlain gave their names to what became the Chorleywood Bread Process, or CBP. Traditional breadmaking develops gluten by fermentation. You mix a dough, then leave it alone for two or three hours while the yeast works and the protein structure builds itself. That waiting is the expensive part. It costs floor space, it costs staff hours, and it is hard to schedule around. CBP replaces the waiting with mechanical energy. A high speed mixer beats the dough hard enough to do in minutes what fermentation does in hours. The number is specific and it is the whole trick. Work published by the Chorleywood researchers found the best loaves came from doughs given between 37 and 46 kilojoules of work per kilogram, and the process was defined around [40 kilojoules per kilogram delivered in no more than five minutes](https://www.cerealsgrains.org/publications/cc/backissues/1975/Documents/chem52%5F106r.pdf?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz). In the units the industry actually uses, that is eleven watt-hours per kilogram of dough. Patent literature from bakery equipment and enzyme companies still specifies it exactly that way, sixty-five years later: mix to eleven watt-hours per kilogram, around 400 to 425 rpm, part of it under vacuum. That energy has to go somewhere. Mixing that hard [raises the dough temperature by 14 to 15 degrees](https://bakerpedia.com/processes/chorleywood-baking-process/?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz), so plant bakeries cool the mixing bowl with a water jacket or add flaked ice to keep the dough in the right range for the yeast. Flour to sliced and bagged, the whole thing runs in about three and a half hours. ## What has to go in when the time comes out Fermentation is not only a clock. It also does chemistry. Take the hours away and you have to put the chemistry back by hand. So CBP doughs carry an improver, typically at [0.3 to 1.0 percent of flour weight](https://bakerpedia.com/processes/chorleywood-baking-process/?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz), containing four things: An **oxidant**, to hold gas in the dough during proving. Ascorbic acid does this job. Potassium bromate used to, and is long gone here. A **hard fat**, high melting point, for crumb structure and softness. **Emulsifiers**, for dough strength and shelf life. This is where 481 and 472e come in, sodium stearoyl lactylate and DATEM. They are not emulsifying anything in the salad dressing sense. They interact with starch and gluten to make a weak dough behave like a strong one and to slow the loaf going stale. **Enzymes**, usually amylases and xylanases, to keep the yeast fed and let the dough expand easily in the prover. On top of the improver: more yeast than a traditional dough, extra water to bring the consistency back to where bulk fermentation would have left it, and control of the air pressure in the mixer headspace, above or below atmospheric, which is how the crumb gets that even fine texture with no big holes in it. Every one of those is a consequence of removing the wait. None of them is a cynical addition. They are the bill for the three hours. ## Why it took hold here The other thing CBP does is tolerate weaker wheat. It was designed so bread could be made from lower protein flour, which in Britain meant using more domestic wheat and less imported Canadian. That argument travelled. [Te Ara records the process arriving in New Zealand](https://teara.govt.nz/en/food-and-beverage-manufacturing/page-6?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz) and cutting a loaf from twelve to twenty four hours down to about two, with loaves that kept twice as long. The Baking Industry Research Trust still lists it in [its own glossary of trade terms](https://www.bakeinfo.co.nz/glossary/chorleywood-bread-process-cbp/?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz), filed under mechanical dough development. There is a local wrinkle worth knowing. Cauvain and Young, who wrote the standard text on CBP, note that Australian and New Zealand plants tend to run higher work levels into the dough than the British original, because the wheat varieties available here are stronger. So what runs in this country is CBP-derived rather than a straight copy of the 1961 method. I have not found a New Zealand bakery that publishes its process, and I am not going to attach the method to a named brand without a source that names them. Which companies actually bake the loaves on the shelf is a separate question, and one I have [already gone through](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/burgen-is-gone-two-companies-own-nearly-all-the-rest/). What I can say is that the term sits in the New Zealand baking industry's own reference material, not in campaign literature. ## Back to the label Read that ingredient list again with the process in front of you and it stops being a random list. The emulsifiers are there because the dough was never fermented. The oil is the hard fat. The soy flour is a traditional improver component. The acidity regulator manages the dough environment. The folic acid is [mandatory in non-organic bread-making wheat flour](https://www.mpi.govt.nz/food-business/bakery-and-grain-based-products/folic-acid-fortification-of-bread?ref=organicfoodtogether.nz) and has nothing to do with the process at all. I have written separately on [why that policy exists and what it trades off](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/folic-acid-in-bread-what-it-is-why-it-exists-and-the-trade-off/). Then there is "Processing aid (wheat)". Under the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, processing aids do not have to be named in an ingredient list, on the reasoning that they have done their job by the time you eat the bread. Enzymes fall into this category. The only reason anything appears at all here is that the aid came from a wheat base, and wheat is a declarable allergen. So the label tells you a processing aid was used and where it came from, and stops. What it was, and how many of them there were, is not on the packet. Enzyme suppliers commonly ship blends rather than single enzymes. Reading that line as an enzyme is my inference from the process, not a stated fact from the manufacturer, and I want to be clear about which is which. ## What I am not saying CBP is not poison and I am not going to pretend it is. Ascorbic acid is vitamin C. The emulsifiers are approved and long studied. The process made bread cheap, consistent and available on a Monday, and it let New Zealand mill more of its own wheat. Those are real gains and most people reading this grew up on the result. What changed for me is narrower. I now know that when I pick up a plant loaf I am holding an engineering solution to a scheduling problem, and that most of the ingredient list exists to compensate for something that was taken out rather than to add something in. Whether the missing fermentation matters to how people digest the loaf is a separate question, and a live one. I am not answering it here. ## The contrast, which is the reason I wrote this My bread takes about twenty hours. My hands are on it for half an hour, maybe an hour, and I am asleep for a good eight. Flour, water, salt, starter. Finding [organic bread flour in New Zealand](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/where-to-get-organic-flour-for-bread-in-nz-what-ive-learned-so-far/) took me considerably longer than learning to bake. It keeps four or five days on the bench, though it rarely gets that far. I used to think the difference between that and a supermarket loaf was ingredients. It is not. It is that I have the one thing a commercial bakery cannot afford, which is time, and every additive in that list is what time costs when you have to buy it. Eleven watt-hours per kilogram, in under five minutes, since 1961. None of that is on the label. The label lists what went into the dough. --- ## Before you go If you found this useful, [sign up free](https://www.organicfoodtogether.nz/#/portal/signup) to get new pieces as they go out. 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