Case study – Fraccaro Pastry
Since 1950s, from the first panettone and pandoro brushed with butter and sweetened by hand, it has come a long way. Michele Fraccaro, co-administrator of the Fraccaro Pastry Shop in Castelfranco Veneto (TV, Italy) , can be proud of that.
The history of Pasticceria Fraccaro is a love story that began in 1932 when Michele’s grandparents, Elena and Giovanni Fraccaro, opened the first bakery. Traces of the original family business are still found in Porta Treviso, the ancient gate of city walls, where the entrance to the old family-run bakery was situated.
From the early age Michele regularly went to the laboratory, where he used to learn the art of leavened products thanks to the skilled hands of his grandparents. His father, together with his two brothers, later decided to continue the family business, with dedication and attention to the choice of quality raw materials.
Mr. Michele, what is the secret of your leavened products?
Nowadays, our cakes are still made with the same mother yeast. Since 1932 our master-leaveners have been daily feeding the sourdough with water and flour and paying special attentions to this.
Our sourdough belongs to an ancient strain that gives our products a unique taste and authentic organoleptic characteristics. Its aromas and fragrances give a recognizable taste to the products.
During years we’ve been specializing in the production of baked leavened products, in particular Easter focaccias in which we are leaders. The recipe of our focaccia has been handed down for 3 generations and keeps alive the tradition of the Easter cake that the old farmers used to enrich with eggs, sugar, butter and grated orange.
When did the biological breakthrough come?
We have been specializing in organic products for over 21 years; we offer a range of 300 organic products, including brioches, vegan and non-vegan croissants, anniversary and everyday cakes exported to over 36 countries around the world.
We resell to high quality specialized shops and, in Italy, we also distribute high-end products. We prefer to turn to delicatessens and gourmet shops rather than to the large-scale distribution. Such strategy allows to deal with stakeholders who share our principles and values, like the quality control on raw materials.
In the organic context, we have developed many recipes – the organic consumer is attentive to quality and health, so distributors are looking for exclusive products with balanced nutritional intakes. We prefer to use alternative sweeteners such as agave syrup or erythritol rather than refined sugar.
How did technology became capital during years?
The leavening with mother dough is carried out as we used to. After 89 years, our experience teaches that taking care of a living material can be a big deal because temperature, humidity and air quality affects results.
We therefore decided to equip ourselves with leavening and cooling cells to ensure the yeasts constant and controlled temperature and humidity levels, in particular for organic and traditional croissants.
Once the dough for croissants is daily made, we need to blast chill it quickly.
This is why we have chosen a Roll In Afinox blast chiller: once kneaded, the dough is rapidly blast chilled to +3°C ate the core. Once the blast chilling cycle is completed, the dough is extracted from the cell, sheeted and put in again in the blast chiller. A further rapid cooling cycle is necessary to carry out the final lamination on the following day.
In addition to a wide range of leavened products for distribution, we produce for our bakery-pizza-restaurant about 600 croissants every week, 360-400 of them are sold on weekends. We have chosen a storage cabinet and a retarder-prover cabinet for the processing of these products, to ensure standardization of processes, regularity and uniformity of the leavening phases of the dough.
The added value of Afinox cabinets is the ability to set a precise degree of humidity: in the 1st and 2nd phase of the leavening process we set the cabinet at 27°C without humidity, while for the 3rd phase we set the humidity at 85%. We program our Afinox cabinets at noon and at 5a.m. we find the croissants leavened at the right point, ready to be baked!
What are your plans for the future?
Our goal is to develop a national franchising project with stores throughout the country. We want to guarantee to each shop a constant quality offering our customers croissants made with sourdough.
Even if Covid has temporarily slowed us down, we are working hard to make this project happen the soonest.
Why did you choose Afinox?
For several reasons. First of all the attention to listen to our specific needs. Honestly, we haven’t faced any problem or malfunction related to the machines so far. But if this were to be, I feel I can rely on quick and punctual solutions.
Another important reason concerns the ease of use: the software can be easily set in autonomy by all my staff.
Furthermore, Afinox products are unbeatable for what the management of unexpected events is concerned! This is extremely important in case of downtime due to power surges: the machine gives alarms and signals about the blackout time, so it is possible to know the exact state of the cycle. Reset the cycle to finish your job, thus reducing wastes is easy as pies!
