The development and application of two methods for determining bromate in bread are described. A gas chromatographic (GC) method which relied on the formation of a volatile derivative of bromate gave a detection limit of 12 μg/kg. Duplicate analyses agreed well but recovery from breads spiked with bromate were low and averaged 30% for brown bread and 42% for white bread. Further studies indicated that this was caused by the derivatization reaction being suppressed by components of the sample and reagents used in their preparation.
