The Wonder of Fresh Bread
Ah, those memories of growing up in a little village in the 50s in Germany with local dairies and butchers and that smell of freshly baked bread wafting from the small bakery , my uncle’s bakery, on the way to school. Fast forward to 2011. What has happened? What about today’s bread baked today? What is fresh bread?
“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, so that its soft, cloying texture remains in an unchanged caricature of freshness, day after depressing day.” writes Andrew Whitley. When I met him at the Terra Madre 2006 shortly before he published his seminal book on bread he was talking enthusiastically about his crusade to reclaim freshness in word and concept: “In the case of bread it can surely mean only one thing, recently baked for the first and only time”.
For thousands of years bread has been made in the same way, flower, water and salt combined with yeast as a raising agent, but in 1961 a new method known as the Chorleywood Process started the industrial bread making. Hard fats, hydrogenated fats and fractioned fats, flour treatment agents, bleach, soya flour, various emulsifiers, preservatives and about 10 different enzymes have all become ingredients to reduce time to make bread and the input of labour.
The Chorleywood process mills at high speed and high temperatures and allows the flour to absorb more water, in fact nearly half of your industrial bread is water. It uses two or three times the usual amount of yeast compared to traditionally made bread and the large increase in the amount of yeast is cited as one possible cause for the growth of yeast intolerance. The large amounts of salt used, double that in traditional recipes, is being linked to heart disease and raised blood pressure.
What then is the alternative to “instant” industrial bread?
I think firstly a change of mind would help. Like the change that has happened with coffee. Freshly made coffee with freshly ground coffee beans is the order of the day. Even in a hotel you would now expect to get freshly made coffee rather than “instant” coffee. So ask for and buy freshly made bread from basic ingredients and support the real bakers.
Secondly bake bread yourself and get that smell back into your kitchen! The time you invest will be paid back in highly nutritious bread.
As for making fresh coffee you need a coffee grinder and a coffee plunger. Ideally for making fresh bread you would have a grain mill. The advantages of producing your own flour by milling whole grain compared to buying white flour are obvious: Whole grain flours are richer in B vitamins, vitamins E and A and niacin and they have a higher content of the minerals potassium, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium and iron. The dietary fibre, which is also a constituent of grain fulfils very important tasks in our digestion, e.g. it satisfies by remaining in the stomach for longer and stimulates bowel activity, it also can prevent diseases of the colon.
You could argue that a grain mill is expensive, but here is a little “Milchmaedchen Rechnung” as we say in German (naïve assessment of the situation):
If you buy whole grain and bake your own bread you could save up to €3 per loaf on a similar loaf you buy. Savings of nearly €300 in 3 months if you would eat a bread a day - the price of a decent grain mill!
Get organised, the choice is yours.
Fore more information and courses: neantog@gmail.com
For information on grain mills hanswwieland@gmail.com
Basis reading: bread matters by Andrew Whitley, Fourth Estate London