Foreword - Slow Dough: Real Bread: Bakers' secrets for making amazing long-rise loaves at home - Chris Young

Slow Dough: Real Bread: Bakers' secrets for making amazing long-rise loaves at home - Chris Young (2016)

Foreword

“You must be mad!” Derisive remarks such as this were once familiar to anyone announcing their intention to quit their job and start a microbakery, or even simply to make their own bread. After all, supermarket loaves are cheap as chips and they stay soft forever. Making your own is a waste of time and you’d have to be a crank to want to bake for a living.

Accusations of commercial naivety bordering on irrationality certainly came my way in the 1970s when I was starting a bakery in a small Cumbrian village using wholemeal/wholewheat flour from the local watermill. But 40 years on, sales of white loaves in the UK are down by 75% since 1974, with a concurrent rise in “brown” and wholemeal. Government figures don’t reveal how much of the switch has been away from industrial loaves in favour of Real Bread, but they confirm that the bread scene in Britain is changing like never before.

It was E.F. Schumacher (author of Small is Beautiful) who observed that a crank is “a small lever that causes revolutions”. Perhaps it’s the sense of an uncontrollable reordering of familiar ways that so perturbs the multi-billion-pound loaf industry, whose market is in evident disarray. But to ordinary citizens, this is a benign ferment (of micro-organisms) whose product will be bread that’s better for individuals, communities and the biosphere.

If that sounds a rather grandiose claim, this book justifies it by setting out the differences between Real Bread and industrial loaves in an admirably accessible way. The message boils down to “out with additives, in with fermentation time” and here simplicity and practicality are leavened with the wry humour (not to mention plentiful puns) essential to the communication of important truths.

As Chris points out in his introduction to this book, one of the Real Bread Campaign’s main tasks is to defend the integrity of concepts such as “sourdough”. “artisan” and “craft” against the opportunism of food companies that mislead the public by applying these words to industrial products and processes that are far from the “real thing”.

This matters, because reducing the mounting burden of diet-related ill health in the UK will only happen if citizens can make well-informed decisions about what to eat. Choosing good bread isn’t that easy, partly because its real goodness is not always evident on the surface, and partly because Real Bread involves much more than well-made dough. The dominant model of loaf production and distribution looks precarious: its high-energy, long-distance, globalized business model isn’t relevant to the de-carbonized economy that the future requires. A dysfunctional commoditized grain system ensures that the flour for our bread is poorer in nutrients than it once was, even as the enormous cost of heart disease, obesity and diabetes indicates that we should be eating less, but better. Cheap loaves with little in them have had their day. What we do need are more real bakers whose growing skills are rewarded with fair pay, self-respect and a sense of fulfilment.

imag

One of the most nonsensical accusations made against the Campaign by its detractors has been that, by drawing attention to the way industrial loaves are made and the undeclared ingredients used in their production, we are somehow “dragging the whole baking industry down”. But rather than collude in the ridiculous pretence that all loaves are equally good, the Campaign encourages professional bakers and amateurs alike to make the best bread they can, using flour from nutritious grains, fermented slowly for maximum digestibility and nourishment, and enjoyed as close to their place of origin as possible. This is where information and a sense of connection transform bread’s meaning and the power contained within it. The home-baked loaf that you place on the family table, made from a named flour, perhaps even grown by a known farmer, isn’t savoured by those who eat it because it’s cheap, but because it is immeasurably rich with the associations that make life worth living. The same applies to Real Bread made nearby by people whom you know or can get to know.

Successful revolutions involve a change of power. The Real Bread revolution is about more even than imaginative career changes, artisan bakery start-ups or niche markets. It’s about peacefully and productively taking the power to make bread back into our own hands. This book shows why and how. If everyone who reads it both uses it and joins the movement, we’ll get closer to our goal of communities in which everyone lives within walking distance of Real Bread. Roll on, as they say.

Andrew Whitley

CO-FOUNDER OF THE REAL BREAD CAMPAIGN