Bread

I normally buy bread from local specialists (East Dulwich Deli being a favourite – great local-made breads, if a bit of a trek) or Waitrose/Ocado (some of it tolerable, for the freezer).

So I’m out of bread, and on my way back from somewhere or other I buy something from Sainsbury’s. Oh dear. The packaging claims it’s ‘Taste the difference’ Slow Fermented Rye, Sunflower and Honey. But lunch today proves it’s tasteless brown cardboard.

I’m sure Tesco – or any of the other industrial retailers – is no better.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the the Chorleywood Bread Process (CBP), the ‘no-time method’ used to make 80% of the UK’s bread these days. It is a peculiar feature of the industrialisation of our food since 1960, and it led to a restructuring of the entire industry in this country. It’s clearly super cheap for the producers. But the resulting product holds no fascination for me. CBP bread may have volume, and the bread may have ‘keeping qualities’, but it is tasteless, texture-free pap. As Diane Dunae has pointed out elsewhere, there’s more texture in a bathroom sponge while “CBP bread doesn’t taste of anything much at all, not even yeast.” I would really rather go hungry.

So much for the advances of technology and civilization. We have clearly – in the UK – gone backwards when it comes to the taste and texture of anything (vast generalisation, but not undeserved).

I’ve been seriously thinking of getting into my own bread-making, owing to the downhill slide in alternatives, and this encounter is the impetuous I need: I cannot eat this garbage any longer, even if only occasionally. If I’m out of proper bread I need to be making my own; or I need to be making my own in any case.

So I’ve acquired a copy of Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery (published in 1977 – she was decrying CBP even then) and shall be making the most of my new, bread-ready oven. Let me know if you’d like to join me, share recipes or whatever.