Crumb-free bread could see astronauts baking in space

Astronauts could soon be waking up to the smell of freshly baked bread thanks to a new dough mixture and oven specially designed for use on the International Space Station (ISS).

According to New Scientist, German company Baking In Space is working with the German Aerospace Centre and food scientists from other research organisations to develop a dough and baking process that produces crumb-free bread.

“[Coming up with the right texture] is the biggest challenge,” says Florian Stukenborg, who is in charge of developing the dough that will be tested during a mission next year.

While bread is a staple food here on Earth, it can be life-threatening in space. According to New Scientist, the first and last people to enjoy bread in space were the two astronauts on NASA’s 1965 Gemini 3 mission, who shared a corned beef sandwich one of them had smuggled on board. The crumbs flew everywhere in the microgravity, and could have got into the electrical panels and started a fire. Bread has been banned ever since, with tortilla wraps being the accepted alternative.

Matthias Boehme at OHB System AG is currently trying to adapt a convection oven suited to the constraints of the ISS. The oven must work on just 250W—a tenth of the power used by a standard oven.

Boehme is also looking at vacuum baking, in which the pressure inside a sealed oven is lowered. Since the boiling point of water decreases as atmospheric pressure decreases, a low-pressure oven would bake at lower temperatures.

“According to our baking experts, the process would also make bread rolls more fluffy,” he says.

Bake In Space will test various approaches on board the ISS during the European Space Agency’s Horizon mission in April 2018.