Bread Matters the State of Modern Bread and a Definitive Guide to Baking your Own
Andrew Whitley

Fourth Estate • London

To Veronica

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter One What’s the Matter with Modern Bread?

Chapter Two Does It Really Matter What Bread We Eat?

Chapter Three Taking Control

Chapter Four The Essential Ingredients

Chapter Five Starting from Scratch

Chapter Six First Bread and Rolls

Chapter Seven Simple Sourdough

Chapter Eight Bread – A Meal In Itself

Chapter Nine of Crust and Crumb

Chapter Ten Sweet Breads and Celebrations

Chapter Eleven Easy as Pie

Chapter Twelve Gluten-Free Baking

Chapter Thirteen Growing Old Gracefully

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

This book, as befits its theme, has been fermenting for quite a while. I started the Village Bakery in Melmerby in 1976, when the growing evidence that man could not live by white industrial bread alone was still being ridiculed by the scientific and medical establishments. At that time, none of the bakeries in nearby Penrith made a wholemeal loaf because there was ‘no demand for it’. All my first bread was wholemeal, made with flour stoneground at the local watermill. Partly to reassure myself that I wasn’t completely mad, I wrote a short history of bread on display boards to hang on the walls of our teashop. So began an attempt to understand why people have often chosen, or been forced, to eat bread that was not very good for them and how this might be changed now that we were discovering so much about the role of good food in public health.

Towards the end of the 1980s the upsurge of apparent allergy and intolerance to the main ingredients of bread presented me with a baking challenge. I had to go back to the first principles of fermentation to make loaves without wheat, gluten or baker’s yeast. It began to dawn on me that industrial bread might be making increasing numbers of people unwell because it was made too quickly. Since then, what little research has been done in this area has suggested that the longer bread is fermented, the more digestible and nutritious it gets.

I hope that something of the same effect can be detected in this book, in which I have tried to pass on the baking knowledge accumulated over 30 years. I have done so not only because making your own bread is one of the most satisfying things you can do but because, as the first chapters reveal, much of what you get in the shops should probably be avoided.

CHAPTER ONE WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH MODERN BREAD?

‘A technological triumph factory bread may be. Taste it has none. Should it be called bread?’ ELIZABETH DAVID, English Bread and Yeast Cookery (Allen Lane, 1977)

A very British loaf affair

Britons consume about eight million loaves a day plus countless rolls, sandwiches, pizzas and croissants. The baking industry is a model of industrial efficiency and British bread is amongst the lowest priced in Europe. Yet if you ask a Continental visitor what they think of living here, likely as not they will mention the lack of good bread.

We ourselves laugh at ‘cotton wool’ bread and put up with tasteless, mass-produced rolls in restaurants, canteens and takeaways. The better-off are tempted by ‘healthy’ loaves fortified with the latest fashionable nutrients, while the poor make do with bread sold primarily on price. If we care about bread, we have a funny way of showing it.

Behind the impressive production figures and the advertising hype of new product launches lies a revealing statistic. We eat less than half as much bread as we did 45 years ago. Well before fads like the low-carbohydrate Atkins diet, people were abandoning bread, and not only because they could afford other foods.

The startling possibility is that British consumers, without their knowledge, have been taking part in a flawed experiment. Back in the early 1960s, the national loaf was fundamentally redesigned. The flour and yeast were changed and a combination of intense energy and additives completely displaced time in the maturing of dough. Almost all our bread has been made this way for nearly half a century. It is white and light and stays soft for days. It is made largely with home-grown wheat and it is cheap. For increasing numbers of people, however, it is inedible.

This book uncovers what goes into the making of a modern loaf and charts the changes that the industry would rather we ignored. As technology finds ever more ingenious ways to adulterate our bread, so science is revealing the havoc this may be causing to public health. Recent research suggests that we urgently need to rethink the way we make bread.

If you are dismayed at the covert corruption of our daily food, you may agree with me that bread matters too much to be left to the industrial bakers. More and more people are taking control over their lives and health by making their own bread. If you are one of them, or would like to be, the second part of this book contains all you need to know in order to make your own bread, with real taste and integrity, bread you can trust and believe in.

Gut feelings

Why would hundreds of thousands of people stop eating bread and eliminate wheat from their diet? Cynics would say that the emergence of private allergy clinics and self-diagnosis by mail order might have something to do with it. For its part, much of the medical profession remains sniffy about the connection between diet and wellbeing. Yet scientific studies do show a surprisingly widespread sensitivity to wheat. This can take an extreme form known as coeliac disease, which is a serious reaction to gliadin, one of the gluten-forming proteins present mostly in wheat but also in smaller amounts in rye, barley and oats. Coeliac disease has a genetic component and, according to the Coeliac Society, may affect as many as one in 100 people in the UK. In his book The Complete Guide to Food Allergy and Intolerance (Bloomsbury, 1998, with L. Gamlin), leading allergy expert Professor Jonathan Brostoff describes coeliacs as ‘casualties of the slow adaptation process between the human race and wheat.’

It seems that sensitivity to gluten and wheat is like an iceberg. The visible part is composed of coeliacs whose condition is diagnosed by well-established tests and whose only treatment is a complete avoidance of gluten. Below the surface is a much larger group of people who have a sensitivity to wheat with varying degrees of severity, from mild discomfort when consuming bread to a condition known as ‘wheat-dependent exercise-induced anaphylaxis’¹.

The strange thing is how recent all this is. Coeliac disease was first diagnosed in the 1950s, but widespread wheat intolerance emerged less than 20 years ago. At almost the same time, people started talking about an invasive strain of yeast called Candida albicans, which caused joint pain and digestive discomfort.

For a baker, this came as quite a shock. For 13 years or so I had been selling a range of wheat breads raised with yeast without once hearing about wheat or yeast intolerance or allergy. Suddenly people started ringing up asking for breads made without wheat or baker’s yeast – on the face of it, something of a tall order, given that the remaining ingredients of bread are just salt and water. Luckily, I was just developing a sourdough rye bread that contained no wheat and was raised using a spontaneous fermentation (lasting about 24 hours) of ‘wild’ yeasts present in the flour. Customers tried it and found that their digestive problems were eased. That was the first in a long line of products made without wheat for a market that had appeared from nowhere. Call it anecdotal (the word opponents use when your argument rattles them), but the evidence was clear: more and more people were buying products specifically because they didn’t contain wheat, or industrial yeast, or both. The bread on offer in the shops seemed to be making them ill.

Respect

British industrial bread commands little respect. This isn’t surprising when it is promoted with such mixed messages. Some loaves, described as having ‘premium’ qualities, seem barely distinguishable from others being sold at less than the price of a postage stamp. ‘Healthy-eating’ brands, adorned with images of nature and vitality, make detailed claims about the virtues of this or that added nutrient. But the big bakers keep quiet about nutrition when pushing their ‘standard’ loaves, which still account for over half of the market and are sold on price alone.

You might think that keeping prices down would be a good way to increase sales. But with bread, low cost and low quality have become so intertwined that conventional economics are turned on their head.

‘The Irish bread industry is driven by spread sheets and low prices,’ commented Derek O’Brien, head of the National Bakery School in Dublin, in 2004. ‘We produce some of the least expensive bread in Europe. But the result? Our bread consumption is one of the lowest in Europe. This is an appalling situation, particularly for the remaining number of smaller bakers, because their future is to a great extent dictated by the industrial baker.’

Many small bakers in the UK would recognise this situation. When low cost becomes below cost, an unseemly race to the bottom is inevitable. In the late 1990s I was told by the chief bakery buyer of one of Britain’s leading supermarkets that the cost of reducing the price of a standard 800g loaf of white sliced bread from 17p to 7p (in line with her main competitor) would be £400,000 a week – a sum that might have been better invested in promoting good food. Two of the main bakeries supplying the cheapest ‘value’ bread went spectacularly bust in 2004-5. Since then, the remaining large bakers have had some success in moving away from low-cost bread and even the supermarkets seem to have realised that loss-leading with something as vital as bread does them little credit. But it will take more than clever branding or a little soya, linseed and omega-3 to dispel the prevailing image of British bread culture as one dominated by pap.

If that seems a harsh judgement, take a look at what actually goes into your daily bread.

This is your loaf

In 1961 the British Baking Industries Research Association in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, devised a breadmaking method using lower-protein wheat, an assortment of additives and high-speed mixing. Over 80 per cent of all UK bread is now made using this method and most of the rest uses a process called ‘activated dough development’ (ADD), which involves a similar range of additives. So, apart from a tiny percentage of bread, this is what we eat today.

The Chorleywood Bread Process (CBP) produces bread of phenomenal volume and lightness, with great labour efficiency and at low apparent cost. It isn’t promoted by name. You won’t see it mentioned on any labels. But you can’t miss it. From the clammy sides of your chilled wedge sandwich to the flabby roll astride every franchised burger, the stuff is there, with a soft, squishy texture that lasts for many days until the preservatives can hold back the mould no longer. If bread forms a ball that sticks to the roof of your mouth as you chew, thank the Chorleywood Bread Process – but don’t dwell on what it will shortly be doing to your guts.

This is Britain’s bread: a technological marvel combining production efficiency with a compelling appeal to the lowest common denominator of taste. It is the very embodiment of the modern age.

Below is a breakdown of a typical Chorleywood Bread Process loaf². Only the first four ingredients in the table – flour, water, salt and yeast – are essential to make bread. In fact, even yeast (as an added ingredient) is unnecessary for breads made with natural leavens or sourdoughs. Bread made with these three or four simple ingredients was the basis of my bakery business for 25 years. So it is reasonable to ask: are all those other ingredients necessary? And, if not, what are they doing in our bread?

Read on and judge for yourself.

If you are unnerved by all the chemical names, you may be assured that the ingredients and additives listed above have received appropriate regulatory approval. Assured, but not reassured. The same could have been said 20 or 50 years ago, when the list would have contained chemicals that have since been banned. Safety assurance has a short shelf life. The development of modern emulsifiers, and especially of the newer bakery enzymes, was given considerable impetus by the withdrawal of the oxidising ‘improver’ potassium bromate, which after many years’ use was discovered to have carcinogenic potential (it is still used in some countries)³.

Moreover, there is a wider concern that makes it hard to accept today’s scientific consensus on food additives. New chemicals are evaluated on a primarily toxicological basis: feed a great deal of your chosen substance to laboratory rats for a limited period and, if they don’t keel over and die, it can be presumed safe for humans. However rigorous, such procedures clearly do not catch the effects of long-term low-level exposure to novel compounds or altered processes, not to mention the ‘cocktail’ effect of combinations of active agents too numerous or unpredictable to model in the laboratory.

Enzymes and the great ‘processing aid’ scam

Enzymes are modern baking’s big secret. A loophole classifies them as ‘processing aids’, which need not be declared on product labels. Additives, on the other hand, must be listed in the ingredients panel. Not surprisingly, most people have no idea that their bread contains added enzymes.

An enzyme is a protein that speeds up a metabolic reaction. Enzymes are extracted from plant, animal, fungal and bacterial sources. Chymosin, for example, is the enzyme used to curdle milk for cheese making. It is either derived from rennet from a calf’s stomach or synthesised by genetic engineering. As you can seen from the table above, a whole host of enzymes is used in baking. Their status as processing aids is based on the assumption that they are ‘used up’ in the production process and are therefore not really present in the final product. This is a deception that allows the food industry to manipulate what we eat without telling us. In their own trade literature, enzyme manufacturers extol the ‘thermo-stability’ of this or that product – in other words its ability to have a lasting effect on the baked bread.

Manufacturers have developed enzymes with two main objectives: to make dough hold more gas (making lighter bread) and to make bread stay softer for longer after baking. As the table shows, many bakery enzymes are derived from substances that are not part of a normal human diet. Even if such enzymes are chemically the same as some of those naturally found in flour or bread dough, they are added in larger amounts than would ever be encountered in ordinary bread.

And now the safety of bakery enzymes has been radically challenged by the discovery that the enzyme transglutaminase, used to make dough stretchier in croissants and some breads, may turn part of the wheat protein toxic to people with severe gluten intolerance⁴. This development is important because it suggests that adding enzymes to bread dough may have unintended and damaging consequences. Surely no one can seriously suggest that bakery enzymes should be omitted from bread labels.

I think we should be suspicious of bakery enzymes for four additional reasons:

 Enzymes can be allergens and should be identified on labels in the same way as the major allergen groups.

 Failure to label enzymes prevents people making informed ethical choices about what they eat.

 There is a fundamental dishonesty in treating enzymes as though they had no effect on baked bread when this is patently why they are used.

 Judgements about ingredients should take into account the whole food; an enzyme may be harmless in itself but may be used to make an undesirable product.

Allergens

People have a right to know not just what is in their food but how it has been made. Some people need to know what is – or may be – in processed food because consuming the wrong thing may make them ill. Many food labels now contain advice designed to warn consumers not just about the actual content of the product in question but also about the possibility of contamination by potential allergens from the production environment.

But here’s a puzzle. Some allergens (peanuts, sesame seeds, gluten, lactose etc) have celebrity status, rightly, because of their potential for serious harm. Others, while known to specialists and sufferers, never make the charts. Amylase is one. Alpha-amylase is an enzyme naturally present in wheat in amounts that vary with variety and growing and harvesting conditions. Millers routinely add it to flour to make a more consistent product. It is also present in some compound bread ‘improvers’.

Amylases are known to cause allergic reactions in some people⁵. There is an occupational health risk to bakery workers if enzymes get into the atmosphere, where they are breathed in and can cause asthma. But recent research has shown that up to 20 per cent of the allergenicity of fungal alpha-amylase can survive in the crusts of bread⁶ (perhaps we should revise the old adage about eating up your crusts; they may do more than make your hair curl). So, while amylase allergy is clearly not an issue on a level with nuts or gluten, it exists and may be exacerbated by the addition of fungal amylases to flour and bread.

Ethical choices

It is not just a question of potential physical discomfort (or worse). As the controversy over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the late 1990s demonstrated, the way food is produced is of growing concern to many people – from the biological integrity of seeds, through farmers’ rights and animal welfare, to the impact on the physical and social environment. In other words, people may make moral judgments about provenance and production methods, even if these appear to have only a marginal bearing on the nature of the actual food they ingest.

For the food enzyme industry, all of nature is a chemistry set. No organisms are too exotic or repulsive to be investigated for possible active agents. As can be seen in the table above, the dough that goes into a loaf of standard factory bread may contain the strangest stuff – a reducing agent derived from animal hair or feathers, or enzymes from the pancreas of a pig. It may come as something of a shock to a Muslim or a Jew or a vegetarian that their daily bread is produced using animal by-products. It is possible that little or nothing of the original substance survives the baking process. But that isn’t the point. Bread has been made using an ingredient or process that some people find offensive. If you don’t know what’s gone into your bread – in the fullest sense of those words – how can you exercise any meaningful choice over whether to eat it or not?

‘Choice’, of course, is the mantra intoned by private business to promote product proliferation and by government to justify the intrusion of free-market economics into social provision. It is ironic therefore, that in their reluctance to declare what really goes into bread industrial bakers inhibit the exercise of informed choice and the regulatory authorities connive with a labelling regime that is geared more to commercial convenience than to true transparency.

Dishonest claims

We are entitled to ask why there is no requirement to tell people exactly what enzymes are put into our daily bread. European law is under review and may require processing aids to be treated like additives and declared on labels, but the new rule will not require bakers to give any more detail than the single word ‘enzymes’. What earthly good is that to consumers? Does it tell them that the enzyme added is alpha-amylase, to which some people are allergic? Does it alert them to the fact that the enzymes in question may include transglutaminase, which can turn wheat protein toxic for people sensitised to gluten? No, it does not.

In other words, we will move from the current state of total secrecy to one of bogus transparency where the information divulged is completely inadequate; it will be transparent only in the sense that you will be able to see right through to the information void on the other side. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder whether there’s something they don’t want us to know.

Cumulative effects

It is perfectly possible that a particular enzyme is ‘harmless’ in isolation, in terms of both toxicity and its functional effect in specific doughs, but the process in which it is a small element may produce bread with raised allergenicity or diminished nutritional status and ultimately, therefore, less healthy people. The challenge to industrial bakers is twofold:

 Can they be sure that all bakery enzymes are safe?

 Does their use produce the best possible bread?

On safety, the transglutaminase issue suggests that we need a more searching regulatory process and a considerably more precautionary approach.

On quality, it all depends how the word is defined. Rather than trade insults across the barricades of personal preference, it is worth asking what the makers of bread with added enzymes are actually trying to achieve: a saleable product or good food? Enzymes are used not for any nutritional benefit to the consumer, but to make it easier to produce bread on an industrial scale, to maximise loaf volume, to soften crumb texture and to maintain that softness for as long as possible. The net result is often a loaf of degraded nutritive value.

So there it is: your standard British loaf, made with all sorts of things you didn’t know were in it. Do people increasingly find modern bread not to their taste because of all these additives and ‘processing aids’? Perhaps. But the changes in bread since the 1960s go deeper. They affect almost every aspect of how it is made. Each change may have had its own logic at the time but together they have left us with bread that may be fundamentally flawed.

How our bread has changed

The great achievement of modern industrial baking was to make a superficially attractive loaf using a high proportion of home-grown wheat. This provided a market for British cereal farmers and saved the bakers the tariffs on imported – mostly Canadian – flour. But to turn British wheat into the kind of bread that most people appeared to want, new methods were required:

 Wheat hybrids were bred to take advantage of intensive chemical agriculture and to produce flour that suited industrial baking methods.

 Millers separated the whole wheat more completely into its constituent parts, ground the flour finer and added enzymes to make it more consistent.

 To make the dough rise quickly, bakers massively increased the amount of yeast.

 Time was squeezed out of the baking process, and with it not just flavour but vital nutritional benefits.

 Freshness was redefined and artificially induced by means of additives, some undeclared.

A technological and commercial triumph turned out to be a nutritional own-goal.

Wheat

At the end of the Second World War, explosives manufacturers experienced a distinct decline in sales. If not exactly beating bombs into ploughshares, they found a ready outlet for their chemicals in the intensive agriculture that was seen as the only way to feed rapidly growing urban populations. Grain varieties were bred to respond to heavy applications of soluble nitrogen, potash and phosphorus fertilisers. But such a regime produces flabby straw that falls over in wind or rain. So wheats with short straw were developed.

Once hooked on soluble chemicals, the new varieties showed signs of succumbing more than before to fungal and pest attack. So new strains were bred for built-in resistance. Shorter stem length means less canopy to suppress weeds, meaning the new varieties also had to be able to thrive in the presence of herbicides. The millers wanted their say, too, so the breeding programme was tweaked to produce wheats with proteins more suitable for bread baking. And each year, yields had to go on rising.

Yield, short straw, disease resistance, milling quality – the plant breeders have obliged. They have done so, to date, without recourse to GM technology, though that is in the wings.

What is striking in all of this – for those of us who think that farming has something to do with feeding people to keep them in good health – is that nutritional quality doesn’t get a look in. No one seems to have asked whether, as variety succeeded variety with bewildering speed, wheat was getting better or worse to eat, more or less nutritious, more or less digestible. The most sophisticated science is used to analyse ‘quality’ differences between contenders for the UK National List of cereal varieties subject to Plant Breeders’ Rights. Yet, cereal scientists, along with the big millers and bakers, act as though, nutritionally, all wheat varieties are much the same. Advances in the purely functional properties of wheat have come at the price of reductions in its nutritional quality. The precursors of modern bread wheats – einkorn, emmer and spelt – all contain more nutrients than their commercial successors. Research at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico revealed that the best traditional wheat varieties had about twice the iron and zinc of popular modern varieties, and their wild relatives had another half as much again⁷. In Europe, the French National Institute for Agricultural Research has shown that the mineral content of current French wheats is 30-40 per cent below that of older varieties⁸.

Milling methods

Before the invention of roller milling, all flour was produced by crushing wheat between revolving stones. All parts of the wheat – bran, germ and starchy endosperm – were pulverised and mixed together into what we know as wholemeal, or whole wheat, flour. If you wanted whiter flour, you had to sift the wholemeal through wire sieves or ‘bolting cloths’ made from cotton, linen or silk. The roller-milling system, deployed from 1870 onwards, was quite different. It passed the wheat between pairs of steel cylinders, which gradually stripped the layers off the grain, sifting the material thus produced into a series of streams, each containing a different fraction of the flour. These could be taken off and bagged separately or recombined to make ‘patent’ flours for various baking purposes.

Wholemeal flour is, in theory, the entire wheat grain (minus its husk) ground into flour. In British parlance, this is flour with a 100 per cent ‘extraction rate’: 100 per cent of the available flour or meal has been ‘extracted’ from the grain. White flour has only approximately 72 per cent of the content of the wheat, the remaining 28 per cent consisting of the bran layers on the outside of the grain and the germ tucked in one end. What used to be called ‘wheatmeal’ was about 85 per cent extraction. ‘Brown’ is a generic term describing flour of about 80 per cent extraction. Most of the vitamins and minerals are in the outer bran layers of wheat. In white flour milling, these are mostly sold for animal feed.

Wheat sold as breadmaking flour is more valuable in monetary terms to the miller than the residues that go to the animals. When it comes to nutritional value, however, the reverse is true. The table below shows what happens when whole wheat is milled to white flour⁹:

Vitamin and mineral loss during the refining of whole wheat to 70 per cent extraction white flour

The only word to describe bread made with such flour is ‘depleted’.

Whereas stone milling and sieving/bolting had generally produced a white flour consisting of 75-80 per cent of the original wheat, roller milling reduced this to 70-73 per cent. The visible effect was to produce a whiter flour with fewer flecks of bran in it. Far more important, however, was the reduction in the roller-milled flour of several important nutrients, including calcium, iron and B vitamins, which the stones had formerly dispersed throughout the flour. Removing the germ, which contains virtually all the valuable vitamin E of the wheat, was a nutritional disaster but a great benefit to the millers. The wheat germ oil tended to oxidise and go rancid within a few weeks. Without it, white flour could last for several months – exactly what was needed as milling companies became larger, with ever-longer distribution chains along the country’s fast-expanding network of railways and roads. Not for the last time, nutritional integrity was a casualty of the commercial need for ‘shelf life’. Some of the vitamin E, incidentally, goes to the supplement industry, which is happy to sell it back to us in capsules at many times what it might have cost us if we simply ate bread made with stoneground wholemeal flour.

In a French study in 2005, stoneground organic flour was shown to have 50 per cent more magnesium and 46 per cent more zinc than roller-milled non-organic flour¹⁰. This effect, it should be explained, was observed not in wholemeal but in flour milled to a finer extraction rate of around 80-85 per cent. Many people consume too little magnesium and the role of zinc in good health is well established. It would not be unreasonable to expect the benefits of organic growing (see page 43) and stone milling to apply similarly to other important micronutrients in flour.

The intriguing question is whether modern roller mills could be adapted to deliver flour with the same nutritional integrity as stoneground. It is hard to believe that the technological ingenuity would be lacking. But commercial will is quite another matter. The track record of the big milling concerns does not suggest a major commitment to the nutritional quality of their flour. Milling technology is currently focused on the functional effects to be had from producing ever finer fractions of flour.

In 1941 nutritional scientists persuaded the government to force a reluctant milling industry to add calcium to its white flour. Three other nutrients (iron, vitamin B₁ and nicotinic acid) were added in 1953 – although in lower amounts than would be found in wholemeal flour. All the other deficiencies and differences between stoneground and roller-milled and wholemeal and white flours listed above remain.

Official advice does now stress the importance of whole grain cereals in the diet. However, almost all the ‘whole’ wheat flour produced today is from roller mills. In other words, it is reassembled from the separated fractions of flour but without the crucial wheat germ oil, on the grounds that replacing it would shorten the flour’s shelf life. Perhaps such flour should be labelled ‘reconstituted semi-whole wheat flour’ to alert consumers to the fact that it does not contain all the elements of the original grain.

Yeast

Ever since our ancestors thousands of years ago noticed that a flour and water paste begins to aerate if left for some hours, people in wheat- and ryegrowing areas have eaten leavened bread. During fermentation, naturally occurring enzymes break carbohydrates down into sugars on which yeasts feed, producing carbon dioxide (the gas that raises the bread) and alcohol. This process was fully understood only after Louis Pasteur’s discovery in 1857 of the micro-organisms involved. It eventually became possible to identify and culture pure strains of yeast that gave fast and predictable results for breadmakers. Of the 160 or so known strains of yeast, the one commonly used for baker’s yeast is Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Other strains are involved in natural leavens and sourdoughs.

Before the development of commercial yeast in the late nineteenth century, bakers had to make their own, either with a ‘wild’ sourdough culture or by making a ‘barm’, which may have been seeded with yeast residue from a brewery. Either way, the process took time because the number of viable yeast cells in a sourdough or barm was relatively small. When commercial yeast became available, it contained much larger populations of cells and worked quickly. But it was expensive, and the thrifty baker could make it go further by using a small quantity in a preliminary ‘sponge’ consisting of a proportion of the flour and water to be used in the bread. This was allowed to ferment for 12 to 24 hours: given warmth, water and food, the yeast cells multiplied. On the following day, fresh flour and water (and occasionally some fat) would be added to make the final dough.

Even when commercial yeast became accessible to all bakers in the twentieth century, the ‘sponge-and-dough’ method remained a favoured way of breadmaking. In a typical overnight recipe from John Kirkland’s famous 1907 manual, The Modern Baker, Confectioner and Caterer, the yeast quantity is less than 0.1 per cent of the final dough weight. According to The Master Bakers’ Book of Breadmaking (National Association of Master Bakers, 1996), the Chorleywood Bread Process needs 2.38 per cent yeast for Vienna bread and rolls. In other words, over 23 times as much initial yeast as in Kirkland’s sponge-and-dough bread. Even compared with the fastest pre-War doughs, the Chorleywood Bread Process uses over three and a half times as much yeast.

If, after several decades in which most bread has been made with increased amounts of yeast, significant numbers of people develop an intolerance or allergy to yeast, it seems reasonable to ask whether there is a link. And there is another thing. Yeast, like the other raw materials of baking, has changed. It, too, needed a makeover if it was to be up to the task of Chorleywood baking. According to a manual for professional bakers, Baking Problems Solved (Stanley Cauvain and Linda Young, Woodhead Publishing Ltd, 2001):

‘When the CBP was introduced in the 1960s the type of baker’s yeast then used was unable to provide carbon dioxide gas in the critical early stages of baking and it became necessary for the yeast strain to be changed. Though the precise nature of the changes is not public knowledge it undoubtedly was related to the enzyme activity within the yeast cell.’ There’s an ominous note in that second sentence: the precise nature of the yeast used to make our national bread is ‘not public knowledge’. This was the 1960s – long (we thought) before the creeping capture of science by private business and certainly a good 20 years before the first emergence of genetic engineering.

About time, too

For almost all of mankind’s baking history, bread had taken a long time to rise. Bakers’ barms or sourdoughs contained relatively sparse populations of mixed strains of ‘wild’ yeasts. Whatever they were and wherever they came from, the one thing they had in common was that they worked slowly. The whole process from starter dough to finished product could take 24 hours or more. Single varieties of the most active strains of yeast appeared in the late nineteenth century and made faster fermentation possible. Though convenient, this was an expensive commercial option and most bakers eked out their yeast by using the sponge-and-dough method described above.

As the price of yeast came down and productivity pressures grew, fermentation times shortened. With the invention of the Chorleywood Bread Process, the goal of ‘instant’ dough became attainable. With new machinery, ingenious chemistry and a terrific blast of (ever so slightly modified) yeast, bread needed no fermentation at all.

It was good for business, of course, and the manufacturer’s costs could be contained or reduced. Everyone could now afford the whitest, softest bread they had ever known, though, curiously, consumption kept on falling.

Research has recently revealed that making yeasted breads quickly may not leave time for important changes to take place. For example, fermenting dough for six hours as opposed to 30 minutes removes around 80 per cent of a potentially carcinogenic substance called acrylamide that is found in bread crusts¹¹, and long yeast fermentations conserve the highest levels of B vitamins in dough (48 per cent of vitamin B₁ is lost in rapidly made white bread)¹².

Freshness

Traditional bakers know that the longer you ferment your dough, the better the bread keeps. Time invested in the making is repaid in the eating. Modern bakers and retailers have destroyed this elegant balance. They have stolen time from the production process, a theft they try to disguise in contradictory ways. In the case of standard sliced and wrapped bread, they use additives to keep the crumb soft (or ‘fresh’, as they would say) for a week or more. With the unwrapped bread, on the other hand, time is distorted in a rather different way.

Supermarkets and their industrial bakery suppliers have robbed ‘freshness’ of all meaning. One loaf, unwrapped and apparently ‘freshly’ baked on the premises, has in fact been made and probably baked elsewhere days or weeks before. Another loaf, baked elsewhere, has been laced with undeclared and unspecified enzymes – a kind of baking Botox – so that its soft, cloying texture remains in an unchanging caricature of freshness, day after depressing day.

To reclaim freshness – word and concept – from the self-serving interests that have hijacked it, two things are necessary: to agree a definition of ‘fresh’ that accords with the best evidence of our senses, and to conquer the unnecessary fear of what happens as freshness wanes. In the case of bread, ‘fresh’ can surely mean only one thing – recently baked (for the first and only time). I have some ideas about enjoying bread as it ages in the final chapter of this book.

So modern baking is schizophrenic about time, now wanting to reduce it to nothing, now trying to extend it indefinitely. And it is also in two minds about its raw materials, torn between the desire to remove things that get in the way and the impulse to add things that will make the bread easier (for machine production), bigger, softer, cheaper, longer lasting or more apparently healthy. Baking technologists just can’t leave well alone. There’s always some functional advantage to be pursued, some marginal value to be prised from dumb nature, as if the human race had never quite mastered this business of bread.

We have evolved an industrial breadmaking system that, in a variety of ways we can no longer ignore, produces bread that more and more people cannot and should not eat. Some would say that the pappy texture and bland flavour of Chorleywood Process bread are reason enough to consign it to the compost heap of food history. However, these qualities are ultimately matters of personal preference. The use of additives, on the other hand, especially those whose provenance or purpose is not apparent to the consumer, raises serious questions of accountability and trust. Above all, the baking industry must respond to the growing body of research that is charting the profound unhealthiness of making bread quickly.

From wheat to finished loaf, industrial baking needs to be reconstructed from first principles, of which the most important is a proper respect for time.

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