Slow Dough: Real Bread: Bakers' secrets for making amazing long-rise loaves at home - Chris Young (2016)
The Fight for Better Bread
In the words of my father-in-law and dad, respectively: slow down and get real!
Since March 2009, I have been the coordinator of the Real Bread Campaign, part of the food and farming charity Sustain. Through my work, I’ve come into contact with some great people, many of whom also happen to be brilliant bakers but whose work goes unsung. Believing their praises do deserve to be sung, I put out an open call through our international supporters’ network for long-rise recipes to form the basis of a book celebrating Real Bread and the people who make it. This is that book.
So, why have we produced a book of breads that take longer to make? Some of the artificial additives industrial loaf fabricators throw into their doughs are used in their drive to reduce one very important natural ingredient: time. Even some domestic recipe writers seem to be in a race to the finish line, instructing their readers to use fast-action yeast, added sugar and warm proving, declaring with glee how little time the loaf will take.
Increasingly, however, Real Bread bakers are reminding people that long and slow tends to be far more satisfying than a quick finish. Far from farinaceous folly, a long-proved dough has more time to develop flavour, tends to produce a less crumbly loaf and, in the case of genuine sourdough, might even offer health benefits.
I’m not a professional baker, which is part of the message of this doughy tome: You might not be an artisan baker (yet) but you can still make brilliant Real Bread. While the bakers from whom we harvested these recipes are experts, you don’t have to be one to bake their loaves. The people we most had in mind when cooking up this book are those passionate home bakers, who’ve got the hang of basic loaves and now want to further their flour arranging. We hope that some professionals will enjoy it, too, and we encourage all of you to experiment with the recipes to make them work for you, make them your own and make the best Real Bread you can.
NB: In compiling this book, I have rewritten and often tweaked recipes that were donated to us for this book. In some cases, the changes have been significant and what appears on the page might better be described as “inspired by”, rather than created by a particular baker, but as I didn’t want to take credit away from any of them, their names still appear. I’m sure you’ll love the loaves but if you’re not utterly pleased as punch with one, please don’t blame the named baker.
If you donated a recipe and the way we made a loaf is different from the way you do, or yours was one of many we simply couldn’t cram in - sorry!
WHERE WE STAND
As I live and work in London, I know more about the bread of Britain than of other countries. Until relatively recently, the future of bread in Britain looked bleak. Following the Second World War, the number of independent bakeries headed into what seemed a permanent decline, with a handful of industrial giants and multiple retailers rising to dominance and helping to speed their demise.
A particularly dark day for Real Bread historians came in July 1961, when the British Baking Industries Research Association unleashed what later became known as the Chorleywood Bread Process (CBP), which takes a shortcut through dough’s natural fermentation and “ripening” time, slashing it from hours or even days to minutes.
Convinced by costly marketing campaigns to believe that one CBP loaf was as good as any other, we began to look to our supermarkets for sandwich rolls, using the same squeeze test we might use for toilet rolls. As a nation, we conspired in a race to the bottom, and by the end of the 1990s we were challenging anyone who had the temerity to charge more than about 7p a loaf. Nope, that’s not a typo: in 1999 at least one supermarket dropped the price of its “value” range own-brand loaves far below even the cost of production, to just seven pence.
Chemistry set
To meet their need for speed, Big Bakers lace their dough with so-called “processing aids” and other artificial additives, which help the dough conform to the stresses of the process; to become stretchy enough to rise high and quickly, and then to have strength enough to stay risen during baking. Other substances might be used to deter the growth of mould and to help the finished loaf to stay softer for longer.
A few thousand years of people eating Real Bread has proved beyond any doubt that it is safe - no, actually good for the vast majority of us. Compared to this, artificial additives have only been subjected to a relatively short period of testing before being declared safe (or “generally recognized as safe” as the more pragmatic US Food and Drink Administration put it) for food manufacturers using them in their products.
No one knows for sure, however, if there might be any adverse effects from long-term consumption of the artificial additives found in the modern industrial loaf and across many people’s diets in other heavily processed foods. Can we trust that these things, either individually or in the endless combinations they’ll turn up in a supermarket shopping basket, are truly safe? History is littered with a veritable chemistry set of substances once used by industrial millers and bakers, only to be withdrawn or banned. They include azodicarbonamide (banned in countries including the UK and Australia but legal in others, including the USA), benzoyl peroxide, agene (nitrogen trichloride, banned in the 1940s) and potassium bromate.
Clean loaf or just clean label?
Though some of the differences between Real Bread and industrial loaves may be obvious, labelling and marketing regulations, and the way they are policed, can leave loopholes that deny shoppers the right to know exactly what they’re getting.
Knowing that many of us find a litany of E numbers off-putting, some manufacturers are now turning to so-called processing aids. By a quirk of EU law, if an industrial loaf (or other food) manufacturer deems an artificial additive to be a “processing aid”, it does not have to appear on the label, as long as any “residues do not present any health risk and do not have any technological effect on the finished product”. As a consequence, suppliers often market these additives as “clean label” or “label friendly”. Companies may defend the use of processing aids with comments along the lines of “we always comply with the law”, which is nice to know. Another defence is that “they get used up during manufacture”, despite the fact that their use may, quite legally, “result in the unintentional but technically unavoidable presence of residues of the substance or its derivatives in the final product”.
The Great British Fake Off
Like the word “bread” itself, the terms “artisan” and “craft” have no legal definition. Anyone can call themselves an artisan or craft baker and market their loaves as such. The production methods used may not be obvious and, in the case of loaves that aren’t pre-packed - such as those from a supermarket in-store “bakery” - you’ll struggle to find whether or not artificial additives have been used.
An allegedly “freshly baked” unwrapped loaf sold by a retailer may have been manufactured a long time ago in a factory far away, then chilled or frozen. Having then been re-baked in a retailer’s “loaf tanning salon” increases the energy consumed in production, and results in a loaf that may well stale faster than a genuinely fresh one. Not that you’d know any of that, so you could be forgiven for making a like-for-like comparison with a loaf of Real Bread from an independent bakery, which helps to sustain more skilled jobs per loaf for local people making genuinely freshly baked bread without the use of artificial additives. Which part of this is fair on you the shopper or a genuine artisan baker?
But while the wrapped, sliced industrial loaf still accounts for the largest percentage of the “bread” market in Britain, it is in decline, with sales falling more than £100 million a year. Retail industry research over the past few years has been consistent in reporting “artisan” and “speciality” bread as being the only sectors of the market seeing significant growth in sales.
THE REAL BREAD CAMPAIGN
From Roman and medieval statutes, through 19th-century wholemeal advocates, including Sylvester Graham and Thomas Allinson, and national newspaper campaigns in the early 20th century, and the Campaign for Real Bread that ran in Britain as the 1970s turned into the 1980s, the fight for better bread is perhaps as old as bread itself.
Since the 1990s, the number of bakers working tirelessly to share their passion for (and loaves of ) Real Bread has grown enormously, as has the interest for what they make and how they make it. A milestone in the origins of the current Real Bread Campaign, which works to unite these people as a coordinated movement, was the 2006 publication of Andrew Whitley’s book Bread Matters. An attempt at putting down the knowledge he’d built up founding and running The Village Bakery Melmerby, between 1976 and 2002, Bread Matters sets out what has gone wrong and, importantly, what we can all do to help change things for the better.
Immediately upon the book’s publication, people took it as a manifesto and began asking Andrew how they could join his fight that so well reflected and represented their own beliefs, personal experience of finding industrial loaves hard to stomach or, in the cases of many bakers, their ways of bread making. After a year or two of this, he turned to his friends at Sustain and asked if the charity fancied being the organization that would join the dots, bringing together everyone who cares about the issues.
In 2008, Sustain set up the Real Bread Campaign website to lay out its beliefs, aims and plans, as well as a Real Bread Finder map to help people track down additive-free loaves locally. Quickly, this attracted the interest of hundreds of people, and after a series of open meetings, Andrew and Sustain officially launched the Campaign on 26 November of that year. Since then it has attracted thousands of supporters in more than 20 countries. Behind a rallying cry of “not all loaves are created equal!”, together we’ve been finding and sharing ways to make bread better for us, better for our communities and better for the planet.
GET REAL
Everyone will have his or her own idea of what Real Bread is, so for the record, here’s how the Campaign defines it:
Real Bread is made without the use of processing aids or any other artificial additives.
Simple, eh? Technically, the only ingredients essential for making bread are flour and water. With these two things you can make unleavened flatbreads, or nurture the yeasts and bacteria naturally present in the flour to create a sourdough culture for leavening. Anything else is, by definition, unnecessary. That said, without a little salt, bread can taste bland and you might prefer to let someone else culture the yeast, rather than do it yourself. We also celebrate the use of other, natural ingredients.
Community
The Real Bread Campaign doesn’t wish to deny any industrial baker their job, but believes that a small, independent Real Bread bakery is of greater benefit to both its bakers and to other people in its local community. These benefits might include:
✵ Skilled, meaningful jobs for local people producing food for their neighbours.
✵ More jobs-per-loaf than an industrial loaf factory.
✵ Opportunities for social interaction between employees and customers.
✵ Support for the local high street and economy: money spent with a local business is more likely to be reinvested locally.
✵ Potential to support local producers, growers or other smaller or more ethical suppliers, by providing an outlet for their goods.
✵ The chance to shop on foot, by bike or public transport, rather than having to drive to an out-of-town megamarket.
Honesty
To protect shoppers and independent businesses alike, the Real Bread Campaign calls for an Honest Crust Act in the UK that will require:
✵ All bakers and retailers to provide full lists of ingredients (and any “processing aids” or other artificial additives used) on all loaf bags. In the case of unwrapped loaves, this information must be displayed clearly at the point of sale.
✵ Meaningful, legal and enforced definitions for the terms “fresh” and “freshly baked” when used in the marketing of loaves - not to be used for “bake-off” products.
✵ Meaningful, legal definitions for “sourdough”, “artisan”, “wholegrain” and “craft”.
✵ Section six of the Bread and Flour Regulations 1998 to be tightened and fully enforced to ensure the likes of dried gluten and soya flour do not make their way into loaves sold as wholemeal.
In the meantime, the Campaign calls upon all bakers and retailers voluntarily to provide full information about their loaves, stop marketing bake-off loaves as fresh, and ensure that the terms “sourdough”, “artisan” and “craft” are used appropriately.
The Real Bread Campaign kneads YOU!
Whether you’re a domestic or professional Real Bread baker (or simply love eating their loaves and just bought this book because you like the pictures) we’d love you to join our mutually supportive, international community and help support our charity’s work.
Read more and join the Real Bread Campaign today at realbreadcampaign.org.