[Misc] Britain's bitter bread battle

Disappointed this is actually about bread and not a thread about your favourite tongue twisters.

We do go a bit Mumsnet on here during an international break don't we.

Anyway to keep it on topic i'm rather partial to a Tesco Finest Limited Edition Caramelised Onion Boule

Bob! said:

I tend to eat very little bread now because of those two reasons.

I bought a 'yellow label' M&S loaf a few months back to keep the cost down. I don't eat much bread. 2 weeks later it still looked the same. It must have been so full of preservatives to look like that at 2 weeks out of date.

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Gluten free bread and lactose free milk last for ages.

I think this may be due to gluten- and lactose-loving bacteria wafting about and invading our foods.

This makes sense because lactose intolerance is a problem because the stomach lacks lactase (hence my chewing lactase with Top Cheese) so the lactose makes its way all along the alimentary tract to the colon where it is eaten by Bactococcus Bastardensis. This bacterium produces irritant metabolites, possible acetaldehyde, that give you the shits.

This is largely fact. I may have made up the name of the bacterium.

Chicken Run said:

What’s not love than a fresh soda bread infused with olives ?

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Since you ask what’s not to love, for me, it would be the olives.

Only wholemeal for me whether it's Hovis extra tasty or M and S wholemeal. Used to eat only White upto 3 years ago but can't stand White bread now.

I don’t really get involved, leave it to bossman behind the counter, I always have chilli sauce though

Official Old Man said:

Bake our own to save money. Prior to that it was Aldi 85p brown bread.
To answer the question how much cheaper is it?
A small loaf, about half the standard size, costs roughly 80p to bake.
Yes, I know. Add to that the £135 bread maker.

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Except you don't need that bread maker.

Ravens at 5ways do a nice malted seed. Like all of their bread. Only use sourdough if I'm doing decorating and need something sanding.

Possibly the best kitchen gadget I’ve ever bought is a Panasonic bread maker, purchased around 20 years ago. I’ve used it regularly over the years but for the last 2 years I’ve used it to make all the bread we eat — at least 2 medium loaves per week. The reason for the change was reading a newspaper article about the additives and chemicals in supermarket bread. I’m not a health nut at all, but I figured that if we have a bread machine we may as well use it more than we did. So I can make bread knowing exactly what goes into each loaf, including reducing the amount of salt and sugar. Most important of all, it tastes so much better.

On the wider question of artisanal breads, yes there are some splendid ones. There’s an outstanding bakery in Eastbourne run by three young German sisters called To The Rise (https://www.totherisebakery.com/). Their sourdough bread is excellent but it’s pricey so I generally stick to my own homemade efforts.

In this little corner of Somerset we are blessed with loads of local bakers who make exceptional bread. We've even got a small artisan baker in our village who bakes pretty much the best bread I have ever tasted. So we regularly spend around a fiver on our bread - we take the view that we eat quite a lot of it, so let's make sure it's decent quality. And, if you're interested, a local food website recently published the article below:

Why a locally-made sourdough loaf costs £4.50​

A sourdough loaf from Rye Bakery in Frome costs £4.50. The same loaf – or at least what might be considered similar – is £1.20 at Asda. Are people getting conned, or is this really the fair price of bread?

Though not always the case, a price tag can be a good barometer for the standard of ingredients in a food product, and the time required to make it. Cheap bread could suggest poor-quality raw materials, time-cutting methods, or that the retailer is doing a dodgy deal on someone – be it the farmer, miller, or baker. In the worst of cases, it’s a medley of all those things.

High time for better bread

‘Sourdough’ describes how a bread is leavened. That is to say, it’s what turns dough from a dense mass of flour and water into a larger, more pillowy mass of flour and water that, when baked, comes out as a soft, airy loaf.

A sourdough culture is a wild, natural yeast that starts to form when organisms in the atmosphere come to feast on a flour and water mixture. Eventually, these organisms fulfil the same function of baker’s yeast – breaking down sugars in flour and farting it out as CO2. This gas creates air pockets, which is how bread rises and gets its soft texture.

The main difference to baker’s yeast is that sourdough cultures work at a much slower rate. Which means we have to wait longer, and prep more in advance, for our bread. The upside is the distinctive, more complex flavour (hence ‘sour’ dough) the culture imparts. And it goes down easier – though sourdough cultures work slower than baker's yeast, they are more efficient at breaking down compounds, such as phytic acid, that our stomachs often struggle with.

More industrial methods of proving dough can cause IBS, bloating, or other digestive issues. Some people with a gluten intolerance experience milder side effects (or none at all) from eating sourdough – a good rule of thumb being the longer a dough has to rise, the less potent its gluten is.
From raw flour to baked bread, it takes about three days to make a sourdough loaf, not to mention continuous upkeep of the mother as a ready-to-hand leavening agent. This is an issue for the industrial food complex. Supermarket retailers, knowing time equals money, want to do everything in their power to keep costs down. Bread, most of all sourdough, is at complete odds with the ‘cheapness to whatever end’ line of thinking. So what’s their answer?

Come forth the Chorleywood process, a breadmaking method that emerged in the 1960s. With the help of various chemicals and processing aids, including a crap ton of fast-acting yeasts, industrial bakers are able to make bread from flour to packaged loaf in three to four hours. It made bread 40% softer, and gave it a shelf life twice as long as before. The trade-off? Your gut might not be too much of a fan. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but celiac disease – the gluten-induced digestive and immune disorder – has been ever rising since the mid-21st century.

Somewhere around 80% of loaves made in the UK use the Chorleywood method, with all the usual players – Warbuton’s, Hovis, Kingsmill – applying some version of the process in making their ‘bread’.

These big brands have, like the rest of us, watched the rise of sourdough over the past decade with wonder. Not wanting to miss out on such an opportunity, Big Bread wanted in. But, since the time sourdough needs is even more an inconvenience for the industrial system than yeast-activated bread, what ends up on the supermarket shelf rarely, if ever, could be considered actual sourdough. At the moment, ‘sourdough’ is no legal term – a fact manufacturers are more than happy to exploit.

‘The dough for genuine sourdough bread is additive-free and made to rise using only a live sourdough starter culture, so it [can’t contain anything] like baking powder or baker’s yeast,’ says Chris Young, who heads up the Real Bread Campaign.

It’s common for manufacturers to add processing aids, like baker’s yeast, to their ‘sourdough’ loaves (which defeats the point of sourdough). It’s also common for them to make it deliberately unclear as to what is and isn’t in their bread. ‘Note that manufacturers can decide some additives are in fact “processing aids” and not declare them on the label,’ says Chris.

The recipe for success

And so onto the other thing that significantly influences the cost of sourdough bread: what’s in it. Bread should contain just flour, water, salt, and some sort of yeast. Like any other food that contains only a few components, those components need to be the best they can be.

For the majority of small-scale sourdough bakeries in the county, that means sourcing flours milled from grains that produce good flavour, are environmentally sound, and can be supplied in at least moderate amounts for commercial sale. Those in the region falling into that category include Stoates in Dorset, Sharpham Park near Glastonbury, and the relatively tiny Burcott Mill near Wells. The one that seems to hit the sweet spot, however, is Shipton Mill in Tetbury, Gloucestershire.

Bakeries such as Hobbs House (Bristol), Bertinet (Bath), and The Village Baking Co. (Rode) all use Shipton Mill (Rye Bakery is the notable exception, but we’ll get to them in a bit). These millers source their grain mostly from local biodynamic and organic farms, meaning no synthetic pesticides and herbicides (tick); retaining soil fertility and biodiversity (tick); wheat varieties like Maris Widgeon that, though yield half the amount of industrial varieties, are able to extract more nutrients from the soil and impart more flavour (big tick).

Shipton Mill aren't forthcoming about which farms these are exactly (some specialty grains aren’t available in the UK, so not all the farms they supply from are local), but organic accreditation shows they’re at least a far cry from those furnishing demands for faster, cheaper bread that’s potentially doing us damage.

A case in point: in 2014, a study found that every two in three bread loves sold by big brand names carried at least some trace of a pesticide or herbicide. Glyphosate, an integral part of Roundup, was among the most common substances. The WHO says glyphosate is ‘probably’ a carcinogenic, or in other terms, can do you a mischief in a host of different ways, from mild fatigue and nausea, to cancers, neurological disorders, and birth defects.

Heritage or rare grains are, to some degree, the alternative to modern wheat varieties reliant on agro-chemicals to develop and bear fruit. Grains like spelt, einkorn, and emmer have been cultivated in Europe for millenia, and are, largely, untouched by modern refinement.

As such, they are often slower to cultivate, channel a higher proportion of energy into growing their stem rather than their valuable grain, and can, without the help of at least some white flour in a recipe, produce a dense loaf. But they do possess higher levels of nutrition, more depth of flavour, natural disease resistance (therefore not requiring fungicides), and larger root systems allowing them to reach deeper soil (therefore not as dependent on fertilisers).

This is where Rye, among a short list of other bakeries in the UK, come into a category of their own. Rye’s Heritage Sourdough came about in 2018, and has become a mainstay of what they do – the flour used is made from entirely heritage grains grown and milled within a 40-mile radius of their bakery in Frome.

More recently, Rye has started to go even further, test-growing their own grain populations – then milling them in their own stonemill – as part of what will eventually become a local bread cycle. Rye’s first loaf using this approach emerged in December last year, and has not been entirely orchestrated off their own back – the bakery’s usual suppliers include Gothelney Farm near Bridgwater, and Stoates and Haye Farm in Dorset, but they’re more than just that.

‘Provenance is important with all the ingredients I use in my bakery and I like to be transparent about where they come from. Why should the grain we use be any different?’ Rye Bakery’s co-owner Owen Postgate told Wicked Leeks.

This idea has manifested as the South West Grain Network, a collective of farmers, millers, and bakers wanting to have more control over what grain can be practical and sustainable to grow; how it should be milled; and how it is baked into bread and at what price it should be sold. This chain, though, starts with the consumer – if people don’t register an interest for, say, a nutritious, resilient, grain requiring low inputs, then farmers won’t grow it.

When we don’t make it ourselves, it may seem unjust to have to pay £4.50 for a sourdough loaf. But for one that’s going to taste nice, have more nutritional value, be kinder to the planet, and not do a number on you – does it really?

Bakero said:

The thing is 100 years ago people's diets weren't chiefly made up of heavily processed foods. Even 40 years ago they weren't. But nowadays, in the UK it is estimated that the average is about 60% UPF, rising to 80% for kids.

Surely, you can see this is an issue. Eating well isn't pretentious nor does it need to be expensive.

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completely agree eating better food is great and not expensive unless you want it to be.

my issue with UPF is that its a largely manufactured term (ironically). its' vague definition would include or exclude many common foods depending on how strict your definition of "not found in the kitchen" is. most ingredients in processed foods are common in cupboards. i went through my shopping once and was surprised how few E numbers or exotic ingredients were in prepped meals, pizza, even crisps.

with this new term they reclassify many ordinary foods as bad, simply because we have more pre-made convenience food, rather than spending a lot of time in the kitchen making pastas, pies and pizzas from scratch. some sodium bicarbonate, potassium chloride or ascorbic acid sounds bad, while having a batch of fermenting yeast of indeterminate origin on the window sill seems fine.

Colonel Mustard said:

There’s an outstanding bakery in Eastbourne run by three young German sisters called To The Rise (https://www.totherisebakery.com/). Their sourdough bread is excellent but it’s pricey so I generally stick to my own homemade efforts.

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Sour dough, three German sisters….. covered in flour…..

beorhthelm said:

completely agree eating better food is great and not expensive unless you want it to be.

my issue with UPF is that its a largely manufactured term (ironically). its' vague definition would include or exclude many common foods depending on how strict your definition of "not found in the kitchen" is. most ingredients in processed foods are common in cupboards. i went through my shopping once and was surprised how few E numbers or exotic ingredients were in prepped meals, pizza, even crisps.

with this new term they reclassify many ordinary foods as bad, simply because we have more pre-made convenience food, rather than spending a lot of time in the kitchen making pastas, pies and pizzas from scratch. some sodium bicarbonate, potassium chloride or ascorbic acid sounds bad, while having a batch of fermenting yeast of indeterminate origin on the window sill seems fine.

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I see what you're getting at but how concrete a definition do you need? As a rule of thumb, it's sound advice, isn't it?

Eat real food not stuff in packets full of unidentifiable ingredients. If you are eating the odd thing, it's not going to kill you but if it's making up the majority of your diet, it's a good idea to cut back.

The concept isn't new but it seems the evidence supporting the conventional wisdom is starting to mount.

As for time in the kitchen, I don't buy it. You can knock up a healthy meal with fresh ingredients in 15-20 minutes. Some people might lack the knowledge and skills but it ain't rocket science.

Lucky in our neck of the woods to have supermarkets that nearly always have a good supply of "yellow stickered" bread products so our freezer always has an abundance of nice multi grain loaves, the more seeds the better.

There was me thinking i could have a Harveys sarnie

Crusty bread all day long

Anger said:

Since you ask what’s not to love, for me, it would be the olives.

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You'll not like what I just posted on the Bond thread, then

I like my bread with nowt takin out.

I've tried it and found it not to my liking...sort of like cardboard and sawdust....no wonder the pasty faced bunny hugger people look so ill

Make it myself (with a breadmaker machine!) use a mix of 50% white flour 25% wholemeal and 25% spelt wholemeal, tastes great and toasts beautifully.
Although sometimes still get the urge for a very crusty white roll, you know the ones - full of air and the crust falls to bits as soon as you bite it!