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#bread#more#food#process#france#chorleywood#real#article#wheat#expensive
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Discussion (54 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I guess I'll never find out why the bread in Europe also has holes.
I resorted to getting chatgpt to make a summary... Which I am loathe to do:
"Chorleywood replaced long fermentation with intensive mechanical mixing, allowing Britain to turn its previously unsuitable low-protein wheat into cheap mass-produced white bread and substantially reduce its reliance on imported Canadian grain."
> The Chorleywood bread process allows the use of lower-protein wheats and reduces processing time,[5] the system being able to produce a loaf of bread from flour to sliced and packaged form in about three and a half hours. This is achieved through the addition of vitamin C, fat, yeast, and intense mechanical working by high-speed mixers, not feasible in a small-scale kitchen.
> The process significantly reduced fermentation time and allowed greater use of non-imported wheat, which helped reduce the price of bread.[4] According to a representative of the British Federation of Bakers, "UK bread is around the cheapest in the world."[5]
As of 2011, 80% of bread made in the United Kingdom used the process, which has also spread to other countries such as Australia, South Africa, South America, Turkey and France.
Does anyone know if the technique mentioned by the earlier Aerated Bread Company still exist today? Like can you buy a bread somewhere made with the technology. No yeast but using carbon dioxide? Sounds like the irish soda bread, so not fermentation by yeast but chemical leavening. But surely they are different because the irish soda bread is dense whereas the Aerated bread sounds like something more fluffy. Googling around I couldn't find a photo how did this bread look like.
But, yes, after about seven paragraphs I could no longer read on, and I had completely lost any interest in his book.
This should be given as an example how marketing can actively damage your product.
I can't believe how high this is on hackernews. It feels odd.
> The guiding principle of the Chorleywood Bread Process (I’m paraphrasing, of course) is that instead of depending for the most part on fermentation to generate all those bubbles of CO2 that later become the “cell structure” of microscopic holes in a loaf of bread, something similar could be achieved by beating that dough to within an inch of its life in a massive mechanical mixer.
It's much the same for all soft (tin) loaves sold across Europe. The exception being breads with crusts - baguettes and rolls etc. and rye bread.
The content is good but yes it's like there is a different class of people that really want to FEEL like they are reading. They are doing THE WORK.
British food has come a long way over time, though there is still that subculture the rejoices in shite, or "proper" as they call it, food.
At least we can feel superior to the US on this front, who produce the worst bread I've ever eaten.
Do you mean south of London?
Frankly all the pre-processed, plastic-wrapped supermarket loaves can get in the bin as far as I'm concerned, I buy sourdough from the local farmers market. But that's significantly more expensive and I recognise it's a position of privilege.
But we all do this with our own stanky poop.
Still a vastly better mechanical design than what they make you use in the US: they barely hold in the socket.
However the plug is actually a really good piece of engineering. There’s so many subtle design features to it that can be genuinely life saving. The only drawback is the often cited problem of stepping on one, to which I say “you shouldn’t be leaving plugs on the floor anyway. And it’s still better that than having kids electrocute themselves or your house burning”
At the time, it was, it allowed the country to feed itself on (largely) its own wheat. They didn't know it could contribute to IBS, they did know there was national food security at stake. Beyond that it made cheaper, mass-produced bread more viable in a bunch of places. Historically, globally it's hard to see cheaper staple food as an entirely bad thing. Now we know the consequences perhaps it's time to rethink.
> causing real bread to become an expensive, and hard to find in some places, specialty.
How do you think it has it caused real bread to become expensive? Is it not more likely that real bread is more expensive to produce and therefore people buy the cheap shit?
That's just not true. It allowed to industrials using british wheat to compete against industrials using canadian wheat. Another approach could have been to protect artisan baker instead of going all in with the industrialisation of food production.
> How do you think it has it caused real bread to become expensive? Is it not more likely that real bread is more expensive to produce and therefore people buy the cheap shit?
Because bakery are seen as a specialty, and do not sell high volumes. You just have to cross the channel to see that real bread doesn't need to be that expensive and small bakers can compete with industrials.
It's right there in the article, in the postwar years the UK was reliant on imported Canadian and other wheats, the process allowed the UK to use its own wheat. "Artisan" bread was not a thing in the early 1960s, AFAICT at that point in time Britain had an extremely impoverished food sector.
> Because bakery are seen as a specialty, and do not sell high volumes. You just have to cross the channel to see that real bread doesn't need to be that expensive
France seems to be a bit of an outlier here AFAICT. But is 'real' bread even that expensive in the UK?
Look, you can get a 24hr sourdough loaf at Tesco for 2 quid - https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/products/272914228 - or 3.75 for the 800g version. And you can tell it's not chorleywood because there's no Ascorbic acid or added oils. Real bread is available at any given supermarket if you want it.
If your real complaint is "Why don't we have France's bakery culture?" well I think that goes a lot deeper.
Since the Chorleywood Bread Process, British agriculture - selective breeding - has bred strains of wheat which reach high protein levels in the British environment. So the Chorleywood process these days is about using the less-good British wheat for cheap supermarket bread.
"Strong" flour that you can buy in shops is now mostly British as well.
As s child, I lived in a world where there were no supply chains, no marketing and no advertising. Profit-based business was seen a mean thing to do.
City living and desire for goods from far away lands - created supply chains which dictate how people should live, in a precariously dependent way such that they can't make their needed things on their own and they can't have them made them locally. What a progress.
I think this is a bit overstating the change: 11% protein (they don't indicate a W factor but it's pretty low) is what I have in my pantry and you can absolutely bake ciabattas with it.
In all my life and travels I've never had bread nearly as good as the French baguette and I've always wondered why.
You can find bread as good as French bread in other places, like some Belgian bakeries but definitely not all of them, or in Vietnam and much of North Africa.
It's really just that much of the Western world seems to have moved to the Chorleywood process because it's cheaper while France has laws to prevent it.
But French bread is still particularly good somehow, there is just nothing like a fresh baguette from a baker in a small village in rural France.
So there's something else going on there IMHO. Specifically with baguettes.
(I wish I could find a good baguette here in Western Australia, most of them are utter trash. As are most of the croissants, though I was able to find a specialist baker for those so not all is lost...)
do this. thank me later. (yes, it takes multiple days!). as good as when we hop over to France.
The first thing I noticed travelling to France as a Brit is everything you eat is delicious. This has changed a bit now; they have McDonald's in France now. But 30 years ago it was mostly true. You could buy a sandwich from a railway station and it would be the best sandwich of your life. It took me a while to realise why. The British and American way to prepare food is to take any old crap but use just one or two strong flavours like bacon, cheese, pickle etc and let it carry the whole thing. The French way (and even more so Italian for that matter) is to take a handful of already delicious ingredients and combine them into something greater than their parts. French sandwiches taste good because the bread tastes good, the butter tastes good, the ham tastes good, and the cheese tastes good. That's the secret.
Interesting stuff.
If you get a burger on a thick brioche bun, or a sub sandwich, and the kitchen has just five minutes ago dabbed on mayo, mustard, and ketchup, there are still inches of bread to chew through. They've also sprinkled on dried flakes of basil or oregano, without sufficient moisture or time to rehydrate them. Or a dinner roll from a basket, piping hot, and the customer puts on butter, moments before eating. The bun becomes an obstacle, rather than a vehicle for the ingredients.
It's understandable that the industry has cut back on the amount of condiments or fats that are applied to bread, but if I finish a plate of pasta and there is no sauce left, what good is that slice of garlic bread? It's the same with rice, and frozen meals: your food, fats, and sauce are laid over a bed of cooked rice, and it would take hours to properly soak in and marry the flavors. If there is a menu choice, I often opt for flatbread, or tortillas, and I feel better that way.
I'm starting to suspect that this has increased widespread aversion to eating bread, and perhaps some percentage of gluten intolerance is sponge intolerance: people are tired of chewing dry bread, and the bread is not perceived as a key nutritional part of the meal, and it can no longer serve a purpose in sopping up juice and sauces, so we've constructed a plausible reason to demand alternatives.
I was quite appalled by what I learned.
The basic idea is that we introduce air into the dough mechanically, which reduces how much time the yeast has to do. It's worked down to the energy: you have to put in so many kWh or joules of work into so many kilograms of dough to get a certain result.
This process is what gives rise (ha ha) to that spongy, tasteless, highly compressible substance that is not recognizable as bread if you're from the other side of the Channel.
The whole idea is to make the largest-looking bread possible using the smallest amount of solid material, in the least amount of time: i.e. not my bread values.
Good old post-WW2 poverty thinking that never went away because profit