Mrs Baird's Bakeries Incorporated

About Mrs. Baird's:
In 1915, when Mrs. Ninnie L. Baird's wood-burning stove could no longer handle all her orders, she paid $25 in cash plus $50 worth of bread and rolls to a hotel for a bigger used one. Mrs. Baird's earliest commercial oven could bake 40 one-pound loaves, which were delivered by her sons via horse-drawn carriage. That carriage is one stop on the tour.
The kitchen might remind you of the old television series "Land of the Giants," with mixing bowls and kneading machines the size of delivery trucks. The oven has been replaced by rows of furnacelike machines with conveyor belts carrying bread over the heating units.
- DEBORAH VOORHEES

The history of Mrs. Baird's Bakery:
Sure, you love Mrs. Baird's bread on your favorite PB&J sandwich, but have you ever wondered what goes into the bread or how it's made? Maybe you've even wondered who Mrs. Baird is.

There really was a Mrs. Baird, and her first name was Ninnie. Her popular bakery began in 1908, when her husband became ill. Mrs. Baird loved to bake and used baking to make money for her family. That's how Mrs. Baird's bread was born.

Mrs. Baird had eight children. Her four daughters helped her in the kitchen, and her four boys walked to deliver the bread. The bread was a hit, and eight years later the company built its first bakery in Fort Worth.

Now, almost 100 years after Mrs. Baird started her company, Mrs. Baird's bread is a hugely successful business, feeding families all over Texas, Oklahoma, and parts of Louisiana, Arkansas and New Mexico.

Here's how Mrs. Baird's bakery plants make bread today:
Step 1: The adventure begins using the same recipe Ninnie Baird used when she made her bread in 1908: flour, water, yeast, milk and shortening. In every loaf of white bread, milk is used to give it a great taste. The bakery uses 5 million pounds of ingredients every month. To begin, some ingredients are weighed and placed together in huge machines called slurry tanks or weigh-up containers. That way, the bakery doesn't have to weigh each individual ingredient. Computers automatically put the ingredients into giant mixers. Then the flour, water and, most importantly, yeast are mixed together. Yeast is a good fungus that you can eat, just like mushrooms. It makes the bread rise and become fluffy.

After all the ingredients are added, a "sponge," or ball of dough, is made. The sponge is then placed in a steel container so it can rise for an hour. This is the first dough that has to rise before being placed in the oven. In the container, the temperature is controlled, not too hot and not too cold. The yeast helps the bread go through a process called fermentation where gases expand, inflating the dough to double its size. Mrs. Baird's Bakery has its dough rise twice.

Step 2: After it has risen, the sponge goes back into the mixer, where it is mixed with the final ingredients to make the final dough. Each kind of bread has its own special ingredients. Even dough has a "nap time," and each loaf rests before it's taken to the make-up area, where the dough gets prettied up. Here the dough is cut into half-loaf pieces, rounded and then flattened by a machine called a "sheeter," the same way Mrs. Baird did with a rolling pin. The two half pieces are then hand-twisted by a real person to make a single loaf. This makes the bread taste smooth and stay fresh. Placed in pans, the loaves go to the proof box where they rise again. In the proof box, the temperature is watched very carefully. The humidity, or how much water is in the air, is also watched. After rising, the loaves are placed in an enormous oven 100 feet long and 100 feet wide.

Step 3: While in the gas-fired oven, the pans of bread move slowly through until they're golden brown. In 20 minutes, 2,000 loaves are baked to perfection. After baking, the hot loaves are cooled to ...