Trays and Coatings Are Instrumental for Craft Baking
Support trays for the baking industry come in a variety of materials and shapes. Customization is key as it greatly impacts process results and the end product characteristics. Trays and pans can be customized to fulfill the technical requirements of baking lines and products they carry by using different materials on frames, baking surfaces and coatings.
Years of testing stand behind R&D for food-safe and long-life coatings for trays and pans. Specific needs and materials dictate choices for the optimum solutions, as well as improving solutions offered. Specialists from three different manufacturers of trays and coatings have detailed the most common demands they get rom their clients, their most popular products, as well as their latest innovations.
European Baker & Biscuit reached out to companies that target craft bakers with their products, in order to get insights on new trends in trays and coatings. Coatresa, an expert in non-stick solutions for baking products, offers a range of non-stick coatings for industrial bakers under the brand Testrong®.
“Our R&D is focused on developing new systems to achieve top performances and ensure the highest durability in the industry. Some examples of our latest developments are: Higher non-stick properties for glazed products and extra abrasion resistance for seeded or toasted products. Coatresa also supplies bakeware specially designed to improve and optimize bakers’ throughput and to maximize the coatings’ performance”, said Georgina Marin, CMO of Coatresa, and Eduard Castaño, VP of Marketing&Business Development. They added that their unique selling point has to do with their service and their choice of environmentally friendly solutions. “Most of our systems are solvent free and with our Testrong coatings, no oil, grease, or releases agents are required for the product depanning”.
SASA Demarle is another company that has a wide range of baking trays, coatings and equipment adapted to meet baker’s needs. Ranging from the artisanal needs to the industrials baker’s needs.
“Any recipe has its own tray (Aluminum, Stainless steel or Alu-Steel tray) depending on the process, its own insert (different type of design and perforation) and his own coating (Silicone, PTFE and PFA coating) formulated and coated in our facilities in France”, explained Geoffrey Conforti, the director of the Bakery Unit of SASA Demarle.
WACKER offers silicone elastomer (silicone rubber) grades and silicone resins for baking tray coatings. According to the company, molds or trays coated with silicone rubber are particularly suitable for buns, white bread, and croissants, and can be used for up to 2,000 baking cycles. They can also be used for sourdoughs, such as rye bread, and for recipes containing acidic ingredients. “Silicone rubber coatings are not suitable for lye pastries, however, because diluted soda lye erodes the silicone coating and the metal structure below”, emphasized the experts from the company. They also mentioned that “Molds or trays coated with silicone resin are particularly suitable for doughs containing high amounts of sugar, fats or eggs, such as cake and cookie doughs, and are the preferred alternative to silicone elastomer coatings for lye pastries. They should be modified with a silicone fluid in order to achieve optimal release results, ” said the company representatives.
You can read the rest of this article in the March/April Issue of European Baker & Biscuit magazine, which you can access by clicking here.