The diversity of customer tastes continually demands new solutions. Tim Beyer is a dough technologist at FRITSCH and one of the people making sure bakeries will continue to be able to offer their customers the delicious products they expect, now and into the future.
At the industrial bakery where he was previously employed, he had already worked partially with the machinery made in Markt Einersheim. “As a baker, you know the name FRITSCH anyway, because almost every baker usually has a ROLLFIX in operation,” Tim asserts. When he saw the job at FRITSCH advertised, he seized the opportunity to transition from a producer to a developer of pastries. He sees a clear trend towards higher quality in the raw materials used and thus of the finished products as well.
Fine pastries – often sweet but sometimes savoury
Making puff pastry involves a process called booking: the base dough itself contains little to no fat at all, but then it is folded over many times with layers of fat between the individual dough layers. “The dough becomes light and flaky through a purely physical process due to the alternating layers of fat and dough,” Tim explains. “Danish pastry is made similarly, but usually consists of fewer layers. Instead, it contains a small amount of yeast that helps achieve the necessary lightness,” the dough technologist continues. “With leavened pastries, no fat is folded in; rather the fat is already added into the base dough. In this case, the yeast alone is responsible for the light consistency of the pastry.” The base recipes for the pastries also differ from one country to another. Danish pastry products are very popular in Western Europe, while puff and leavened pastries are more strongly preferred in Eastern Europe.
“For me, one of the most unusual combinations I have come across so far was a puff pastry with a minced meat and cabbage filling,” says Tim. "Most pastries are based on a sweet dough, even if the final product is ultimately savoury. Puff pastry is a good example of this. In Germany particularly, it was only used for making sweet snacks until just a few years ago. Today it is used with all kinds of vegetable, fish or other savoury fillings. The most common doughs are puff and Danish pastry doughs for croissants and turnovers, leavened dough for whirls and seasonal pastries, and sometimes even shortcrust dough.
"I find the versatility of the work here exciting. The customers keep coming back to us with very special requests and requirements for making their regional products", Tim tells us.
Versatile possibilities with the MULTIFLEX L 700
Tim has the ideal tool at his disposal for testing out all kinds of pastries: the MULTIFLEX L 700. This bakery machine combines the gentle cutting/turning process with specialized accessory tools on a single production line.
Tim uses the MULTIFLEX L 700’s many possibilities mainly to experiment with many different shapes. “One example is the decorating roller for braided pastries. It cuts the outer edges of the dough so that, after filling and longitudinal cutting, they can be folded over to make the turnover look like a braid,” Tim explains. "I am really all about using existing tools to develop new ideas and make them reproducible. That makes it easier for customers to introduce new pastry shapes.“
Ultimately, customers don’t necessarily need to buy new equipment; instead they can make relatively minor changes that enable them to create new products. “In the end, our aim is to offer our customers something that they can easily adopt,” says Tim.
Tim is a trained master baker & has worked as a senior dough technologist at FRITSCH since 2017. Following his apprenticeship, he worked as a baker for 4 years & then decided to complete a 2-year training course at the State College of Food Technology in Kulmbach, northern Bavaria, to become a food technologist. After that, Tim worked 4 years for an industrial baker in Gerolzhofen before joining FRITSCH to develop new products with innovative decorations.
"I am really all about using existing tools to develop new ideas and make them reproducible. That makes it easier for customers to introduce new pastry shapes.”
Tim Beyer, dough technologist at the FRITSCH World of Bakery