How To Make Good Food Go Further: Recipes and Tips from The New English Kitchen. Rose Prince
martial arts. But he also loved to bake. He liked the science and enjoyed using his skill – judging the readiness of the dough at every stage, shaping it by hand, and baking it in a century-old brick oven. He even liked to be up at night working while everyone else slept. His hours were strictly controlled by his trade union, in spite of his lonely job. Any slight alteration to the weekly timetable was subject to intense negotiation: well-muscled Steve versus a skinny shop manager, hell bent on not provoking the baker to lose his temper.
In the Midlands factory I visited many years later, the bakers use their hands only to push buttons during their eight-hour shift. This bread is made via the Chorleywood Process, the revolutionary high-speed mechanical baking system invented in 1961. The factory never rests, baking around the clock. It takes just one and three-quarter hours for a loaf to make its journey along the production line, helped by extra yeast and water and high-speed mixers. It is necessary to add flour ‘improvers’, usually in the form of soya flour, to ensure that the bread will literally rise to the occasion in such an artificially short space of time. Enzyme processing aids, softening agents, sugars, fats and preservatives are also sometimes added. These ingredients combine to speed up the natural breadmaking process, resulting in a soft, sweetish loaf with a long shelf life, which fits neatly into the modern maxim that shopping should happen just once a week.
And where do you, the consumer, fit in? The bread factories would say that all this is done for your benefit. This is the bread you want, and indeed for many, soft, sweet bread is easy to like; children in particular are swiftly seduced.
The high-tech mechanisation of bread comes at the cost of its integrity, however. Compare factory-produced bread to Italian dried durum wheat pasta, most of which is now made speedily in giant factories. The mixing is done high in their ceilings, the dough passes through giant tubes, is pressed through the various dies that make the shapes and then travels into vast drying machines that imitate the Neapolitan sun and sea breezes. But it still contains just flour and water. Pasta is perfect for mechanisation – the food itself never loses its integrity. Bread, on the other hand, needs a whole lot of help by way of additives if it is to survive the Chorleywood palaver.
Bread in Society
When I criticised sliced and wrapped bread in a newspaper for the first time, it provoked a reaction from the industry that both surprised and annoyed me. Their letters of complaint did not exactly defend their process; instead, they justified it by saying that it ‘allowed everyone to eat cheap white bread’. This polemic takes us back over 140 years, when refined white bread had status. The upper classes ate white bread, the poor could afford only the rough, wholegrain type. Flour was ground between stones and then painstakingly sifted to remove the wheatgerm, leaving the flour pure and white – an expensive process.
Then roller mills were invented and suddenly white flour was cheaper to produce. The china rollers removed the brown (good) bits in the flour efficiently. This flour was the forerunner of our modern sliced and wrapped bread. It did indeed give cheap white bread to the poor, but I find it sickening that the modern industry is still arguing that this is the point of high-speed mechanisation. I believe that what it is really saying is: ‘You’re poor, so you get bread with additives, too much yeast, and no flavour; its integral goodness has been milled out, artificial vitamins have been added to replace it – but you can lump it because you are eating white bread, you lucky people.’
Food snobbery is alive and well, sadly. And highly divisive. There is still one form of nutrition for one group in society and one for another. What can you say in a country that still has two different words for the meal eaten in the middle of the day?
Mechanised breadmaking is no longer about feeding everyone white bread; it is about profit. It is about producing more for less, faster – and to hell with breadmaking tradition. But breadmaking, just like winemaking or rearing a beef steer naturally, is a slow process that yields results that are worth the wait. The recipes in this chapter help to solve the problem of how to afford good bread. They show that bread can be made inexpensively and retain its integrity, and they also show how to use every last crumb. This is bread for all.
How to recognise good bread
There has been a definite surge of interest in handmade or craft bread. This is bread made in the traditional way with two fermentations, during which time it builds true flavour. Good flour is essential. Bread made from stoneground flour retains wheatgerm, even if the ‘brown’ has been sifted out. Some bakers are interested again in good flour, in the slower baking process and also in traditional ovens – there are now commercial bakeries with domed brick ovens, offering all kinds of loaves made from a wide variety of grains.
When you buy bread, take a good look at it. The crust should not be too thick but its outer veneer should be brittle and crisp. The shape should be as the baker intended – bread that has been hurried will have a lopsided appearance where the interior has risen too fast, breaking through the crust. Smell the bread, too. The aroma of new baking should cling to a fresh loaf. Once it begins to fade, your bread is ready to use for toast or in recipes.
Feel the bread. The interior crumb should have elasticity, tearing when pulled rather than breaking. Despite its bubbly appearance, it should feel heavy for its size. Compare the weight of a piece of factory-produced sliced bread to a similar-sized slice of bread made with stoneground flour at traditional speed. Dry, crumbly bread has either been incorrectly made or is no longer fresh.
Finally, when you taste the bread, you should be able to detect the flavour of the grain. Even in white bread, if the flour is stoneground the flavour will be enhanced by traces of the oils that remain in it, and which are diminished in ordinary, roller-milled flour. Good bread will also taste ripe, indicating that it has been given a good long time to rise. This is most pronounced in sourdough bread, which undergoes a lengthy fermentation.
Where to buy bread
