Bread Matters: The sorry state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own. Andrew Whitley
is made with white flour, which is intrinsically pretty tasteless, one might have thought that some attention would be paid to the differences in flavour between various wheat varieties. It seems, however, that the average British consumer rather favours blandness. Some years ago a large independent bakery firm did some trials with a sourdough system for making standard white sliced loaves, but did not adopt the new method when taste panels reported that the bread had ‘too much flavour’.
For those home bakers who do want to make the best-tasting bread, I recommend British wheat every time. It goes without saying that I mean good, organically grown British wheat. Any wheat grown in a cold, sunless summer, harvested too late and needing to be dried mechanically is unlikely to taste wonderful. But there is something about the conditions in the better kind of British summer that, combined with the right soil and a suitable wheat variety, can produce flour that tastes superb. And I do mean British, not just English. Some of the highest-protein wheat in Britain has been grown on the Black Isle (north of Inverness), whose microclimate and extended summer day-length must be partly responsible1. I hope that the work currently being done in various European countries to develop wheat varieties more suited to organic systems will not forget to include flavour as a key criterion.
Volume
It often seems that the only measure of flour quality that counts is loaf volume. In addition to the remarks about flavour above, I would point out that there is an inverse correlation between volume and nutritional value. The more white flour there is in a dough, the more gluten and hence the bigger the aggregate volume of all the fermentation gases trapped in the dough structure. The bran layers and the wheat germ, where almost all the minerals and micronutrients reside, are not capable of holding gas: they act as a dead weight which must be ‘carried’ by the gluten structure. So any dough with an appreciable amount of bran and germ (e.g. made with a flour of 85 per cent extraction or higher) cannot be expected to expand to the volume of its all-white counterpart. The same applies to dough enriched with other ingredients such as seeds, nuts, fruits, vegetables and spices: all will tend to depress loaf volume. But so what? Let’s have a little less stress on structural engineering and a little more on flavour and nutrition. Bread is food, after all.
Bread machine mixes
Not so long ago, the market for home-baking flours was in steep decline. Then came automatic breadmakers and an opportunity for mills to ‘add value’ by presenting what they had formerly sold as ‘flour’ as ‘bread machine mix’. Sometimes it is just a matter of new packaging, but the mixes may include some additional ingredients. Things such as nuts and seeds are obvious and will be easily visible. But ‘improving’ additives, such as vitamin C and alpha-amylase enzymes, may be there too – presumably to help ensure that the machine produces a perfect result every time, ‘untouched by human hand’, as they used to say. Many big mills routinely add amylase to the flours they supply to bakeries. It is an enzyme that occurs naturally in wheat and its role in breadmaking is to convert starch granules into maltose, which can then be fermented by baker’s yeast to produce the carbon dioxide gas that expands the dough. Some wheats do not have enough natural alpha-amylase and so the miller adds extra; most commercial amylases are now derived by genetic engineering from fungi such as Aspergillus oryzae.
The presence of additives, hidden or declared, in mixes for bread machines may not be to everyone’s liking. The idea that this way of making bread requires a special mix suggests just another attempt to create a dependent consumer – whereas surely the whole point of making your own bread is to enjoy some independence from the increasingly monolithic food system. Those who share this view can be reassured that it is perfectly possible to make good bread in a bread machine using ordinary flour, yeast, salt and water.
Other flours and grains
Rye
Of the other flours of interest to bakers, rye is probably the most important. Once widely grown in Britain, its use declined from the seventeenth century as agricultural improvements made wheat growing easier and the public love affair with white wheat bread took hold. Rye prospers in poorer soils and colder climates than wheat and is still widely grown in northeastern Europe and northern Russia. With the recent emergence of wheat intolerances, rye bread has gained some popularity in the UK but it is still very much a minority taste. Rye flour does contain gluten, so it is unsuitable for people with coeliac disease, but there is less of it than in wheat flour. Rye gluten can trap fermentation gases but it is much weaker than wheat gluten, so pure rye bread will not rise so much. Rye is rich in pentosans, components of non-starch polysaccharides or dietary fibre; they are mainly soluble and have a blood-cholesterol-lowering effect.
From the baker’s point of view, pentosans contribute to rye flour’s ability to absorb a great deal of water. Indeed, a pure rye dough must be made wet or the resulting bread will be like concrete. Rye flour is alkaline and bland-tasting, so if you use it to make ordinary bread you are likely to get an insipid brick. This is why rye and sourdough are so often linked. Sourdough – a spontaneous fermentation of yeasts and bacteria found in the flour itself, which produces lactic and acetic acids – is essential for rye bread because:
It creates flavour from a bland flour.
The acids counteract excessive enzyme activity in the dough, which can make it collapse during baking.
Acidity in the baked loaf helps it to keep for longer.
The acid flavour of sourdough rye bread can be a bit of a shock to the English palate, but it grows on you. It is an essential accompaniment to strong flavours, such as smoked fish or ripe cheese.
Barley
‘For ten-o’clocks we’d have barley bannocks and a piece of Willimer Whang [a hard cheese from West Cumberland],’ according to William Dodd, a farmer and local historian from Ousby Row, a couple of miles from my bakery in Melmerby. Cumberland baking was full of sweet recipes using the sugar, spices, ginger and rum that came in through the ports of Whitehaven and Maryport, the third leg of the triangular trade taking British goods to Africa and slaves to the West Indies. William Dodd’s bannocks may have been made with pure barley flour, but probably included a little wheat to hold them together.
Barley was widely used for bread in the northern uplands, where poorer soils and a damp climate made wheat difficult to grow. Now it is almost exclusively used in brewing – understandable on account of its very low gluten content, but a pity from the nutritional point of view. Recent research has highlighted the fact that barley has good quantities of vitamin E and high levels of soluble fibre (beta glucans), which may have a cholesterol-lowering potential similar to oats (see below).
Barley flour can be added to a wheat dough at up to 30 per cent of the total flour weight without major changes in dough quality. When baked, it has a pronounced sweetness and a suggestion of maltiness. This effect can be multiplied if the barley flour is cooked with some water before being added to the dough: gelatinisation triggers the enzymic conversion of starch to maltose (as indeed it does with all flours). I learned this from the recipe for Tibetan barley bread in my first baking guide, the inimitable Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe Brown (Shambala Publications, 1970).
The advantages of barley flour to the home baker are that:
It is suitable for a wheat-free diet.
It adds a sweet, slightly malty flavour to bread.
It is digestible and nutritious.
Oats
The gluten status of oats is still a matter of some controversy. Although the quantity of gluten in oats was always known to be small, they were traditionally off-limits to coeliacs (people with a serious gluten intolerance). Then several studies, particularly in Finland, showed that oats could be tolerated without harm by most coeliac adults and children. However, there is not complete unanimity