Introduction to Frozen Dough

Frozen dough technology is a new bread-making process developed in the late 1950s and is now quite widespread in many countries and regions. The popularity of chain store operations in the bread industry, both domestically and internationally, has greatly boosted the development of frozen dough. Since the 1990s, over 80% of bakeries in the United States have used frozen dough or frozen baked goods. In French industrialized bakeries, frozen dough products account for 39% of the bread market share. However, China's frozen dough technology only began around the mid-1990s, about thirty years behind countries where the technology is more mature. Broadly speaking, frozen dough refers to all commercially available semi-finished products made primarily from flour, processed by machine kneading, and then quick-frozen, requiring further processing. In a narrower sense, frozen dough specifically refers to bread production technology using yeast fermentation. During production, a frozen dough improver, F99, is added, and the dough is quickly frozen above its ice crystal point (approximately -7°C) before being stored at -18°C. This creates a semi-finished bread product that requires further processing, such as thawing, fermentation, and baking.