FAQ Want to learn more about bread and baking?
We've gathered together the questions that we are most often asked. If you can't find the answer to your question here, please do get in touch with us.
Bread and baking
Most of our customers want sliced bread because it is easier and quicker to handle in everyday life. Less handling means you reduce the risk of developing mould. A sliced loaf means you can take out just the right amount if you decide to freeze your bread. For us it’s important to provide good service and make your daily life that little bit easier.
Making sourdough involves mixing wheat and/or rye flour with water into a loose dough, which is then left to rise. Lactic acid, acetic acid and aromatic compounds of natural microorganisms called acid bacteria form in the sourdough.
Baking with sourdough has a number of advantages. The bread is moister, stays fresh for longer, is less crumbly, has a better texture and a richer aroma and acidic taste. The bread is also less sensitive to mould.
Giving our bread a long shelf-life is important to us. Mainly because it contributes to reducing the risk of food waste.
Pågen offers bread that stays fresh for long without using preservatives. We are very careful about hygiene in our bakeries to prevent mould spores getting into the bread. No one touches the bread after it comes out of the oven and before it is packed. A lot of our bread is baked with sourdough, which affects shelf-life in a positive way.
The durability of bread depends on how it is baked and with what, how it is stored, the type of packaging used and the temperature at which it is stored. We mark the durability on the packaging by specifying what day it was baked and a best-before-date. In its original packaging and stored at room temperature, our products keep at least to the best before date. If bread is mouldy you should of course not eat it, but often it is thrown away completely unnecessarily.
Bread is always best kept at room temperature and in a sealed plastic bag. You shouldn't keep your bread in the fridge, as it ages quicker and the bread goes hard.
Health, nutrition and wellbeing
To bake gluten free bread you have to isolate the gluten free products from any other bakery products containing gluten. The reason is that there will always be some flour containing gluten spreading through the air. We have currently no possibility to offer gluten free products in our range.
Bread rich in fibre, with the Keyhole symbol and with a low sugar content is suitable, but individual recommendations are hard to provide. Look at the nutritional information on the packaging or here on the website to determine whether a type of bread is suitable for you.
Bread is considered unsweetened if we haven’t added sugar for a sweeter taste, only what is needed as yeast nutrition. Yeast needs nutrients in the form of sugar to ferment. Sometimes natural sugars in the cereal are not enough.
Bread can never be totally sugar-free since flour naturally contains sugars. This is why unsweetened bread can contain sugars in the nutrition declaration but not in the ingredient list.
The amount of sugar varies, but generally compared to several other foods, bread's sugar level is relatively low and we strive to keep the sugar levels down without compromising on taste.
Yes, we have a lot of bread that is rich in fibre. Dietary fibre is the carbohydrates in plants that are not degraded during digestion but reach the colon largely unaffected. Fibre is good for the function of the stomach and intestines. It is also useful because it provides a pleasant feeling of saturation and makes blood sugar rise slowly.
Whole grain can only be found in cereals such as wheat, rye and oats and is grain with no parts removed, not even the husk. You use it in many different ways; as fine or coarse-ground wholemeal flour, flakes or the entire grain. We have several types of bread and Swedish toast that are baked with whole grain.
Whole grain is good for many reasons:
- It contains a lot of fibre
- It is an important source of iron and vitamin B
- It has a positive effect on blood sugar levels and cholesterol
- It may reduce the risk of diabetes, colon cancer and cardiovascular diseases
The keyhole symbol is a Swedish food label with the aim of making it easier for consumers to find lean, fibre-rich products. The keyhole label is given to products with a low content of fat, salt and sugar, and to products with a high content of dietary fibre. About a third of our bread has the keyhole symbol.
Ingredients
No, Pågen doesn’t use palm oil in any of our products. We have previously used a certified palm oil in a small part of our range – in Krisprolls and in Gifflar Cinnamon. Our goal is to bake as much as possible with locally grown ingredients, without sacrificing product quality or taste. Therefore we now instead use Swedish rapeseed oil in Krisprolls and a mixture of rapeseed and coconut oil in Gifflar Cinnamon.
You can find a specific type of product, such as a vegan product, in our Bread selector, and through the declaration on the packaging. We only use vegetable fat and we bake all our bread without milk or eggs, while some of our pastry contains these ingredients.
Enzymes are a type of protein found in plants and animals that trigger processes without being consumed themselves. Grain kernels include several enzymes that are active when the kernels germinate. One of them, amylases, has been added in the baking process for many years. This allows starch in the flour to break down into sugars and to make the bread more moist and give it better volume.
All our standard bread is baked without preservatives. The reason our bread stays fresh for a long time is excellent hygiene in the bakeries and because no one touches the bread after it leaves the oven. Our use of sourdough also helps to keep the bread fresh for longer.
Some ingredients such as additives have an identification number, which is the E-number. The 'E' means that the EU (European Union) has approved the additive. Examples of E numbers are E450 and E500 which are two different types of raising agent. We are generally restrictive to the use of additives.
An emulsifier is essentially a fat that makes it easier to mix oil with water. we only use vegetable emulsifiers based on sunflower and rapeseed oil.
No, we do not use any genetically modified raw ingredients.
Sustainability
The bread bag fills an important function as it helps keep bread fresh. Our goal is to continuously reduce the use of plastic and to ensure that packaging has as little impact as possible on the environment. The packaging accounts for 2-5% of our products climate footprint.
All our bags our recycable. Some of the bags are recycled into new material, while the rest goes to energy recovery. We continuously evaluate the packaging solutions we use and have a long-term goal to use renewable and degradable materials.
The packaging itself has information on how it should be sorted for recycling. The bags used for bread and pastry should be sorted as plastic, while the bags for Swedish toasts (Krisprolls) are made of paper. There are two different bag closures; clip bands with a steel thread that should be submitted to metal recycling and clips that are only made of plastic.
Pågen is strictly against sludge fertilization. We only use flour from wheat and rye grown on fields that according to contract are not fertilized with sewage sludge, as it can spread substances that are harmful to the environment and health on the fields. The method is not proven or secured.
All the flour we bake with comes from cereals grown without straw-shortening growth regulators. This is a fundamental requirement we place on all farmers delivering cereal to our mill, where the flour we use is ground. Product safety is something we give high priority to, and therefore, it is important to take care of our raw materials all the way back to the field.
As far as possible we bake with Swedish ingredients. It is important for us to have good control of the raw material origins: the quality and where and in what way they were grown and processed.
Our most used ingredient is flour. It comes from our own mills located close to our bakeries. The flour is milled from Swedish cereals grown in nearby fields by farmers we have a close and long-term cooperation with. This means we control the whole chain, from grain to bread.
Food waste is one of the world's most important sustainability issues and we continuously work in a circular flow to minimize waste in all parts of our business. The cyclic idea is with us in everything we do and in all parts of our process – in bakeries, in stores and in homes.
No, we don’t at the moment.
Cereal and other ingredients create the major part of our products’ impact on the environment and something we work hard to minimize. We continuously evaluate alternatives and work actively to make conventional cultivation more sustainable. For example to reduce the need for plant protection products and minimize chemicals in the fields.
There are rules on how organic bread should be handled separately in bakeries, which is a challenge as we bake with other ingredients. For us it is not realistic to completely switch to organic production. The biggest problem is the availability of Swedish organic ingredients that meet our quality requirements.
Studies have shown that bread is one of the most climate-smart foods. Their climate footprint is roughly the same as leguminous plants and several plant-based food products, something that few people are aware of.
Most of bread's climate impact comes from its ingredients; mainly flour. Our greatest opportunity to reduce environmental impact is to work with our suppliers to find climate-saving measures – one of our priority areas. Transport is often believed to account for a large proportion of the impact, but only accounts for 6% of the climate footprint.