I've been baking on and off for twenty years, but it's only recently I've started to consider what I'm working with in any detail.
I'm absolutely aware of the difference between British and imported wheat. Results are very much improved and work is made easier by using very strong Canadian flour, but supporting British business (I'm a Londoner) add complexity to the choice.
I buy flour made from British wheat, but it requires extra effort to achieve an almost-as-good result as when working with imported flour.
This difference is particularly interesting for me. The industry that provides my current career (I'm a CG artist) is undergoing significant changes. I look to the future and a contemplate a possible change of career.
Do I buy Canadian flour and deliver a product that people expect? Do I sacrifice a little of the result, at least while I learn how to work more effectively with British flour, in order to be able to promote myself as a small business supporting UK enterprise.
As an American, I found the protein situation and the whole “Canadian” flour concept bizarre.
In the US, most high quality flours will state their protein percentage reasonably prominently on the label. It’s not particularly hard to buy commercial flour at a fairly wide range of protein levels - 13.5% and even higher protein flours are available and inexpensive. And (lucky for us?) they’re basically all farmed in the US.
But in Europe, the labels seem more interested in ash content and the milling technique, and, at best, the protein can sometimes be inferred from the nutritional information. The last time I shopped for bread flour in Europe, I found a Canadian flour with sort of acceptable protein at a very high price, and I found a Croatian “Pizza” flour that was even better at a lower price.
Do not take American mass-produced sandwich bread as any kind of product that Europeans should wish they had :)
The irony that caught my eye in the article is that American mass-produced sandwich bread is depicted as this old-fashioned, slow production process. It takes far too long for the time-crunched futuristic British bakers. Who can wait 5 hours for yeast to ferment? The Chorleywood process comes to the rescue and whips and explodes the water-flour mixture into a foam that is baked seconds later. While those old-fashioned Americans are still waiting for their ancient traditional yeast to slowly do its thing.
At the same time, we have legions of new-age Rogan-adjacent food influencers on both sides of the Atlantic droning on about how American flour makes them bloated and tired (a line that Rogan himself repeats ad nauseam) while European flour avoids all of these problems.
There are so many things for which modern mass or mass-ish production methods can produce results as good or better than artisanal techniques. Nails, knives [0], textiles, etc are all examples as long as one is considering a modern example that is trying to be good.
But a halfway decent loaf of bread made using hundreds-of-years-old techniques (albeit probably with modern yeast [1] if it’s not sourdough) is just dramatically better than “modern” bread, even though the latter often contains highly engineered ingredients and is made with extreme precision.
[0] I know it’s kind of sad, but a well designed blade cut from a sheet of high quality steel and beveled appropriately is better than even a very, very well made Japanese knife made from the alloys that, for some reason, are still state of the art in Japan. I do imagine that a highly skilled artisan could produce an even better knife from modern steels, but this is a rarity and is very, very expensive.
[1] Actual modern yeast is dramatically better than your average supermarket yeast, in flavor, performance and convenience. In the US market, this means that you should use SAF, not Red Star. Good sourdough starter is still just an artisanal thing.
> "at best, the protein can sometimes be inferred from the nutritional information."
I looked at some recently in the UK and the nutritional information is always per 100g and says e.g. 11.5g protein. Is there something wrong with that meaning 11.5% without any inference, or are continental European nutritional information boxes presented differently?
In the US, at least in larger sized bags, flour seems to be treated as an ingredient and there might not be a nutritional fact label. I admit that I didn’t look that carefully last time I was in a European grocery store.
I imagine that the 11.5g you’re looking at really does mean 11.5%.
Huh? Processed ingredients don't generally get a pass on nutritional labeling requirements in the US. A bag of flour in a grocery store should have a label.
The European grocery-bought bag of sugar I have lying around has a regular nutritional label, including a list of ingredients. Spoilers: sugar is made out of sugar and contains almost 100g of sugar per 100g.
I consider myself a decent amateur baker and I've never noticed a huge difference in bread flours. I buy from a local mill because they sell interesting grains and I want to support them. Otherwise I get King Arthur, or Bob's Red Mill if I need something a bit more specific. KA is particularly good because their recipes are usually reliable and they're designed around their flours. The selection of baking ingredients is usually much wider in the average US supermarket compared to the average European one in my experience.
> I consider myself a decent amateur baker and I've never noticed a huge difference in bread flours.
If you make sourdough, have a crack at using standard supermarket flour and then try adding some organic stone ground or other expensive flour with special snob factor.
I am far from expert but notice a big difference.
(I’d say to try 100% organic stoneground but getting a good rise can be quite hard).
I once did an experiment in which I baked two otherwise identical loaves, made under as close to identical conditions as I could arrange, very carefully measured, with the only difference being the flour. I used 11.5% protein malted flour and 13.5% protein untreated flour. The breads rose the same amount, looked and tasted basically indistinguishable, but had a dramatic difference in texture. The higher protein bread was more cohesive and resisted falling apart or being pulled apart much more strongly. Maybe I should try the experiment again, better, without any malt involved.
In any case, I think that the basic bread flours from King Arthur and Bob’s Red Mill are decently high in protein. King Arthur Bread Flour is 12.7% and they sell even higher protein flours. Bob’s Red Mill doesn’t obviously list a percentage, but the nutrition facts suggest it’s around 13%.
There are British companies that sell (among other things) flour made from Canadian wheat.
The specific one whose flours I use for my (very amateur) bread baking is Shipton Mill. I tend to make my bread using some of their very strong Canadian flour and some of their others which are weaker but possibly produce more interesting-tasting bread. (I do not guarantee that I would actually notice the difference in a blind test. I haven't tried.) One of the other flours I use is made from some continental-European and some British wheat. Another is all-British.
(I am not personally all that concerned whether my flour-buying supports British businesses; I'm just one person making a small amount of bread for my own family's use and the impact of my flour purchases on the national economy is a rounding error on top of a rounding error.)
As others have said, you could try using not-Canadian wheat and adding some vital wheat gluten. I haven't tried doing this myself but my understanding is that it works about as well as using stronger flour to begin with. It might make your ingredient lists a little less appealing if you're going to be doing this commercially, though.
Ships three times a week from Halifax docked at Birkenhead's grain elevator. The flour was then transferred to the mill over the road. British wheat flour (refined) at that point in history (60s) could not get to more than about 9% protein, not really enough to raise a loaf.
Common Market (? 1975) and we have tariffs &c so British wheat gets some serious cross-breeding attention. And now you can get home grown strong white flour above 11.5g. I think there was a similar story with Sugar cane and beet. The old Spillers mill is now flats, and the grain elevator was demolished decades ago.
But, yes, a few of the ships still come and yes you can get Canadian flour at 14 to 15%. One local artisan baker uses French flour as a matter of principle. Others don't specify the source. I'd say develop your recipes and go for it.
During Covid, the local corner shop in London managed to source some amazing Bulgarian white flour. It must have been high protein, and made the best bread. Once supply chains went back to normal, they went back to British and Canadian flours, and my bread has never been as nice.
>work is made easier by using very strong Canadian flour
what is up with Canadian flour? Just recently we were talking to an acquaintance here in Bay Area who makes her own bread from specially ordered Canadian flour.
How do the economics pan out? Do you pay more for gluten at higher purity than the ~10% you get when you buy it in sacks of flour?
The retail case is interesting, although maybe not indicative of wholesale
I suppose this is a function of whether gluten is a usable by-product of making low-protein cake flour. In that case i would expect industrial bread to simply add by-product gluten to cheaper flour. But that might obviate the search for higher-gluten wheat that the article describes. Really, i need more data.
Great article, but it's not telling the whole story.
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.
I've got a few pet peeves about bread and American food service. Bread is spongy, and it's designed to sop up liquids and sauces. But when you're served bread in a restaurant, or incorporate a recipe at home, there is seldom time enough, or sauce enough, to soak sufficiently into the bread.
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.
This article makes it sound like a good thing, but bread made using the Chorleywood process is considered as ultra-processed food and studies shows that it can contribute to IBS.
IMO This invention has been bad for the UK, causing real bread to become an expensive, and hard to find in some places, specialty.
Brits will pop up like snails in the rain to defend this god awful bread. They'll explain to you for the 15th time that it was a necessity back in the day, or how it's cheaper or faster to make or whatever reason they come up with in the moment. Fellow Brits, we know this, it's ok, it's 2026 the ration times are over. It's time to move on or accept reality.
Right, but that is because it essentially was a necessity. Its fortification also aided in the developmental health of generations of children. Snark about it all you like; it was valuable.
People in fact don't eat dull white sliced bread in anything like the quantity they did. The majority of bread sold might be like that but we just eat less bread full stop.
But first, when you say "this godawful bread", what exactly do you mean? Chorleywood is a process, not an outcome. It's not just the template pre-sliced white/wholemeal/brown loaf thing from the three big brands. Quite a lot of bread you might think is not Chorleywood essentially is.
Go to even a larger French supermarket and buy a baguette, and that will very likely be a Chorleywood-based process. Much in-store-bakery bread is a modified Chorleywood process (if it is not, it is another similarly "ultra-processed" method, apparently called Activated Dough Development).
Most supermarket "sourdough type" bread, even some quite expensive stuff, is a modified Chorleywood process. Most ciabatta are.
I don't really eat "cut loaf" bread anymore for quite immediate health reasons — it invariably causes acid reflux and then skin irritation, so I gave it up a long time back. But I do still eat the odd part-baked bread roll and even some of those are Chorleywood process.
There is a good chance that if you're in a posh café you're still eating a Chorleywood-type bread. Because it is a way of making bread at scale; it is not a single product outcome.
> Most supermarket "sourdough type" bread, even some quite expensive stuff, is a modified Chorleywood process. Most ciabatta are.
I assume this is one reason why most supermarket "sourdough type" bread is, well, not good. (Sure, it's better than the cheapo sliced-white stuff. There's a lot of space between that and actually-good.)
I don't claim to know for sure that no bread made with Chorleywood-type processes is good. I am fairly sure, though, that no bread I've had that I have good reason to suspect was made that way has ever been much good.
(One specific complaint: It tends to have crumb that lacks elasticity. If you try to spread anything fairly thick on it -- soft cheese, say -- it tears and crumbles.If I do the same thing with one of my own loaves, the crumb flexes but doesn't tear or disintegrate. This isn't the only thing I find unsatisfactory about even supposedly fancy supermarket bread, but it's a thing I can describe fairly explicitly rather than just waving my hands and saying "well, it's just not good, you know?".)
> I don't claim to know for sure that no bread made with Chorleywood-type processes is good. I am fairly sure, though, that no bread I've had that I have good reason to suspect was made that way has ever been much good.
I want to say that I also find Chorleywood bread to be "noticeable" somehow, because it feels like it always is compared to my local artisan place, but I have realised this evening while reading about the other common accelerated process used here — ADD — on this impressive page:
… that it might be difficult to tell these two processes apart from each other meaningfully by taste. Whereas the difference from non-industrialised, slow-fermented bread is usually pretty obvious.
(FWIW I do still eat the supermarket sourdoughs along with part-baked things, because the artisan place is less convenient — though it has just started to offer a terrifyingly convenient delivery service -- but mainly I am doing this to slow down my bread consumption even further; ultimately I feel healthier if I eat less bread.)
It's slightly depressing how much better the everyday food is just some 300kms east of London (i.e. in France). I was shocked the first time I pitched up in a random Carrefour and saw that their basic food is an essentially unobtainable level of quality in the UK.
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.
USian here, guilty as charged. Although I imagine it's the same as in the U.K. in terms of a lot of people who eat a lot of crap, while there are still plenty of people who know and appreciate good food, including baked goods. So, there is good bread here, but either you make it yourself or pay a premium.
I'd note that south or southeast would work, even southwest might. But East would clearly lead to the Netherlands. (they may also eat better bread there too, I wouldn't know)
One of the effects of the strike was that white sliced was in short supply and mangled people ended up with weird granary loaves etc as they were all that was left in the shelves. They liked them.
And from that day granary and seeded breads became a lot more popular over the bland spongy white sliced stuff.
I will say that whatever the failings of white sliced, I still prefer it to over-sweetened US bread.
I don't really understand this either. Mixer taps are just better, but I have separate taps in my bath tub despite the block of houses being built in the 2010s. Guess some people like the aesthetic.
Probably not in your bath, but in houses with water tanks at least one of the cold taps will be fed directly from the mains supply. If you are drinking it then you want it straight from the mains rather than from the tank in your loft that’s been sat there for a while and had all sorts of things falling into it
... Huh. So, these seem to have totally died out in Ireland, despite us changing the rules on mixers at about the same time as the UK did (Irish plumbing and electrical rules tend to follow UK ones). You'll see them in old installations, but more or less never in modern ones (even modern antique-stylised plumbing has anachronistic mixer taps). Hadn't realised that they were still a thing in the UK.
The reality is that the process is used all round the world these days (as covered in the article), not just in Britain, and its done that by being fast and cheap. It's also doubtful that it's any worse for you than American supermarket breads which are pumped full of sugar, emulsified oils etc etc.
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.
Harsh but true. It's the same phenomenon as defending the BS 1363 power plug that needed an embedded fuse because their domestic postwar electrical wiring was Not Great -- to save on copper.
Yeah BS 1363 is a really weird British standard to pick on, especially in a discussion about our food standards! Well engineered to actually stay in the socket, sockets have safety shutters as well as the earthing which other standards bizarrely lived without and it's not easily confused with a myriad of similar but incompatible standards. The fuse is a non-issue in practical use, and handy if your circuit is high current and your power cord isn't.
People who prefer plugs that are fun to step on are doing electrical interfaces wrong!
They're all horrid to step on, so that's not really worth discussing.
The US plug (NEMA 1-15P is the 2-prong version, or 5-15P for the most common 3-prong grounded) is actually pretty decent. They stay in sockets pretty well if the sockets aren't bottom-of-the-barrel garbage products which, sadly, many things in the US are in general.
What many people miss when comparing US and EU plugs are that they're actually doing fairly different jobs. The 120V mains in the US is significantly less trouble than the 240V in Europe, so you can get away with a lot less mechanically on the plug. The US NEMA 6-15P plug design (the 240V version of the standard plug) is, accordingly, kind of shit. But at least it's rare enough that receptacles tend to be of decent quality, which mitigates a lot. The locking versions (L5-15R etc) are actually quite good, and should almost always be used when possible and appropriate. They're good to 480V and even a bit beyond -- not just working but actually good -- and you can't say that about most EU plug designs. You guys have those horribly bulky pin-and-sleeve disasters and we get nice NEMA locking plugs for our three-phase.
One of the other things that European plugs have to deal with, and US plugs don't, is that European electricians have no idea how to separate hot and neutral wires and basically wire them up randomly. This has major consequences in a lot of product design and is really really annoying when you're trying to build something safe. (Namely: in the US you're often (but not always) not allowed to fuse neutral wires. That makes sense, for safety reasons. You have to fuse hot... but in Europe you don't know which one is hot, so you have to fuse them both. Which means you just fused neutral. Design conflict!) That shows up in the plugs, too; with no idea where hot is, you have to be more careful and can't use neutral to help you out.
British plugs are worse to step on, not because the pins are any worse to have jammed into your foot but because the design of the plugs means that if you leave one unplugged on the floor there's an excellent chance that it ends up in caltrop configuration with the pins pointing upward, whereas a US-style plug is (I think) more likely to end up with the pins pointing sideways where they're less likely to hurt your foot when you step on the plug.
But in all other respects the British mains plug design is really rather good. It does a good job of making partially-plugged-in plugs still safe, it's nice and robust, it readily stays firmly plugged in, etc.; US plugs are much worse in these respects and I think so are typical continental European ones.
BS 1363 isn't an EU plug though. Doesn't have issues with separation of hot and neutral wires (and does have a fuse for the hot wire built in) and nor is it specified with the idea that electrocution risk is no biggie or that not falling out of walls (a big issue with some Euro plug and socket combinations too) is up to the manufacturer. And having one type of plug for all regular home appliances in the UK and a different one for three phase feels like a more sensible split than the range of 2 and 3 pin options of varying quality and compatibility that CEE7 and NEMA present.
Fair point on BS 1363 not being EU, and about UK electricians not being incompetent (I actually didn't know they were careful unlike the continent -- that's just one of those things that once you have to deal with the insanity that is continental Europe, it doesn't really much matter what else is out there).
But my point about electrocution risk is that 240V is not twice as dangerous as 120V. It's actually much, much worse. And 480V is worse still. We used to say that screwing up 120V will hurt you, 240V will kill you, and 480V will kill you, start your corpse on fire, and blind everyone around you. So the design requirements for all 240V class plugs are much more important.
> not falling out of walls ... is up to the manufacturer
This one is a real problem in the US because there is a standard, it is a good standard, parts are made and tested to the standard, and standards-compliant parts work very well. But few people require the damn standard. If you want good receptacles in the US, get stuff that's marked "Federal Specification W-C-596 rated" (aka "Fed Spec"; "Spec Grade" is self-certified to... something... which is... not the same thing... but in practice the manufacturers seem not to abuse that term too much; often lower-volume part numbers seem only to be available as "Spec Grade" presumably due to testing cost). It will perform well.
As a Brit I will tell you that not all of us like this processed shit that passes for bread.
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”
The peak of British engineering was in the 1990s when I briefly lived there, and you could not buy small appliances with a plug attached. You got the bare wire, and you had to buy a separate plug, and connect it yourself at home.
Of course, any rational British person would instantly understand that the best way to ensure safety is to have every single person wiring up every single plug in their house.
That’s a gross over exaggeration. Most electrical equipment did come with a plug. The white appliances that didn’t was because they were kitchen appliances that either wired into a separate ring, or the wire had to be threaded through small gaps in the kitchen cupboards.
For that last point, I’ve often ended up cutting the plug off new kitchen appliances, thread the cable, then wire a new plug afterwards.
Mostly I’m happy about that, but you can’t remove the plug from dead appliances anymore and keep it (along with the 48 other “spares”) now they are all moulded plastic.
> defending the BS 1363 power plug that needed an embedded fuse because their domestic postwar electrical wiring was Not Great
Where would you put the fuse, then?
Also, if you think that's "Not Great", just take a look at the concentrated pile of sketchiness that passes for domestic wiring in the US. Every single house in the US is an electrical fire waiting to happen - and with "balloon frame" construction which is purpose-designed to both reduce construction costs and ensure the complete destruction of the building with even a minor fire, you've got plenty for that to work with.
In the electrical panels, of course. You'd only need fuses in the plug if you wired up your home with a braindamaged topology like a ring circuit. (Alas, ring circuits are very common in British home wiring.)
You'd have a dedicated outlet on a dedicated circuit for the TIG welder. In North America, that dedicated outlet would have a different physical plug shape than your lamp, so as to avoid confusion. Of course, if in the UK you use exactly the same plug shape for both lamp and welder, I can see how that could be unsafe...
I cannot really think of worse bread than pret or that first picture garbage. It's just so horrible compared what I bake at home, but sure, you can keep it for 40 years and it'll still be the same. Apparently people value that over their colon health.
AFAICT the two processing steps that have the most impact are the super fine milling that is used to create modern flour, and the removal of the bran from the flour. Those are likely the same whether you have Chorleywood bread or homemade 4 ingredient bread.
I suspect that Chorleywood bread made with stone ground whole wheat flour is better for you than home made four ingredient white bread. (with the caveat that Chorleywood probably doesn't work with such flour).
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?
> 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.
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.
I wonder about bakeries too. When traveling in France and elsewhere in Europe, the uniformity of bakery bread has suggested to me that a lot of it is made from a mix.
Stop obsesing with 2-4% diference in gluten! English flour, Americans flour - just make dough denser and it will keep shape longer before going flat.
Especially if you bake in baking pan! In pan anything keeps bread (actually pan :> ) shape! Corn, buckwheat, rice, whatever.
Without pan "week gluten" make bread flat. But on the other hand week gluten flour is better for cakes makers.
Without gluten and pan you can make pancakes-like bread what still is called bread in some current but ancient traditions.
O, and "wheat only bread" started to be so popular (as in: be only one thing called bread) only when yeasts has been discovered and only in West Europe / North America culture. Even Germany still is using a lot of rye and Mexico is using a lot of corn...
And to article subject: yea, mixing harder adds a lot of air into dough and when heated gas expands so bread "grows"... And, especially in pan, it looks
"normal"... But intensive mixing also kills yeasts that create CO^2 in dough
so it kills bread growth... So, yeah, you realy need that gluten so
air is trapped in the dough :)
Also short bread growth time kills taste... But you can faster push whatever-you-are-making to customers!
And that suposedly "american" "sponge-and-dough" is just ancient and global way of making bread...
All I want to know is why are Parisian baguettes so good? From this article I get that they are a low-gluten bread. But can that be all? I've always suspected a secret variety of wheat.
In all my life and travels I've never had bread nearly as good as the French baguette and I've always wondered why.
French bread is just normal bread, while most other places seem to use the Chorleywood process now, which produces something different.
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.
I don't think that's the only reason. Here in Germany, you can also buy that fluffy white bread—usually wrapped in plastic—that's probably made that way. But most bread in Germany is still produced the traditional way, especially since it's often not pure wheat bread but rather rye bread or mixed-grain bread. Still, a real French baguette is unbeatable. Maybe it's the quality of the flour. But I'm sure it's mainly the very long resting time before baking. In my experience, that's also what makes pizza dough especially soft and flavorful.
You can get soft bread in Norway that is much like the stuff that is ubiquitous in the UK but it is marketed for making toast. Most of the rest is much more interesting, and I'm sure better for you.
You can buy non-chorleywood bread from bakers and from most supermarkets in the UK (look for their 'sourdough' loaves, some might even give a fermentation time)
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...)
It is mostly the freshness. There is a reason it all comes from small local bakeries - it has to be made that morning. Even by the afternoon it will not be as good.
I learned to bake when I lived in London, because the average bread was simply awful. It's surprisingly easy to get something as good at home, as long as you have a decent dutch oven.
It really makes me wonder what else is going on everywhere else, because it really comes down to just flour, water, salt, and yeast.
I thought so too. When I started, I was obsessed with getting every variable and every step of the process just right. I measured and documented everything: The number of folds, the humidity in the room ...
Then I discovered Jim Lahey's no-knead bread recipe, which gave me virtually the same results, for a grand total of 5 minutes of active work.
Long, slow fermentation using cultured yeast and a special Viennese style steam oven are essential for baguettes. They traditionally use soft French flour, but I'm not sure it makes the difference. The downside of baguettes is they don't last more than a day, but that's ok in France because there's a boulangerie on every corner. Baguettes are not homemade bread. Brioche is homemade and just as wonderful and far better than the garbage Brits/Americans make and call brioche for their burger buns.
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.
Long fermentation with little sourdough is making a come back in France (e.g the Respectus Panis thing) but I would think it's harder to apply to baguettes for professional bakers looking at how many they churn a day. That would be a lot of proofing bread to store.
It's usually less about a secret wheat variety and more about the specific flour grading (like French T65) and a strict traditional process.
The long, slow fermentation allows those complex flavors to develop naturally. Combine that high hydration with a really hot, steam-injected oven, and you get the sudden expansion needed for that perfect crispy crust and open crumb...
For some reason I read this in James Burke's voice and I could swear I was teleported back to the 80's watching a hitherto unseen episode of Connections.
I'm sure this was a very interesting article but after 7 paragraphs telling me that bread had changed in this one weird way, but not yet telling me how, it started feeling like marketing and I couldn't read more.
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.
This word bloat is why I can rarely read non-fiction books even if their topic is interesting. I want the summary and then option to read more detail if I want, not have to go through pages and pages of padding before getting to the interesting ideas or facts. There was interesting information in the article but the idea that it takes up a third of his book, with multiple interviews about the process is the opposite, is exactly what I'd avoid reading.
I think this is a result of click-bait titles. The title primes you to find out about the "little holes in your bread", so you start reading to find out about that and of course they leave that info to the end. It reminds me of the way so many YouTube videos will talk round and round the subject before getting to the actual point.
> 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.
What absolute slop. I don't even know if anything in this is true. And an article with a title about little holes contains multiple photos of bread, none of which actually show the holes? I would be embarrassed if someone I knew put their name on something like this.
> More to the point, the ciabatta depends for its production on modern breadmaking techniques, chief among them high-hydration doughs. And in order to pull off high hydration doughs you need “strong” modern flours with very high gluten and protein levels. And for the most part, even in Italy, those flours have to be imported.
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.
Yes, but when done in industrial (or store) setting they use processes that go faster than what you use at home. Those processes needs the extra protein.
That actually makes no sense. This article disputes this claim as well.
Also you can certainly make a high hydration dough with 11% protein flour but it'll probably be mediocre at best. I highly doubt it'll be worth the effort you'd need to put into it versus a higher protein flour.
I read about the Chorleywood Bread Process in a book out of the library at a time when I was making a bunch of bread: it was the year 1993.
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.
It's as if the author, having come across a fairly interesting topic, decided to see how poorly hen could write about it.
People complain a lot about AI written articles, but is this any better? I don't think so, I don't care who authors it but I don't want discursions and distractions.
Some blog posts could have just been a link to the related wikipedia page[1] and some are just clearly a re-written version of that (goes for "content" on YT from some of the better known history ones).
I was hoping this would be about a new way to augur the events of the day from my morning toast to ensemble with the tea leaves at the bottom of my morning cuppa, alas ...
>> You realise the extent to which the world around is sometime quite precariously perched on these supply chains.
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.
Unless you lived thousands of years ago, there was a supply chain. For bread there was a farmer, a miller, and a baker. That's a supply chain. And they were even more profit hungry back then, adulterating the flour with fillers to save money.
They are not being sarcastic. My grandparents lived in a place like this - the old ways have been forgotten by most but in my family you only have to go back two generations before it's all pretty much living off the land...
Caught me at the right time.
I've been baking on and off for twenty years, but it's only recently I've started to consider what I'm working with in any detail.
I'm absolutely aware of the difference between British and imported wheat. Results are very much improved and work is made easier by using very strong Canadian flour, but supporting British business (I'm a Londoner) add complexity to the choice.
I buy flour made from British wheat, but it requires extra effort to achieve an almost-as-good result as when working with imported flour.
This difference is particularly interesting for me. The industry that provides my current career (I'm a CG artist) is undergoing significant changes. I look to the future and a contemplate a possible change of career.
Do I buy Canadian flour and deliver a product that people expect? Do I sacrifice a little of the result, at least while I learn how to work more effectively with British flour, in order to be able to promote myself as a small business supporting UK enterprise.
Decisions, decisions.
What an odd morning on HN.
As an American, I found the protein situation and the whole “Canadian” flour concept bizarre.
In the US, most high quality flours will state their protein percentage reasonably prominently on the label. It’s not particularly hard to buy commercial flour at a fairly wide range of protein levels - 13.5% and even higher protein flours are available and inexpensive. And (lucky for us?) they’re basically all farmed in the US.
But in Europe, the labels seem more interested in ash content and the milling technique, and, at best, the protein can sometimes be inferred from the nutritional information. The last time I shopped for bread flour in Europe, I found a Canadian flour with sort of acceptable protein at a very high price, and I found a Croatian “Pizza” flour that was even better at a lower price.
Do not take American mass-produced sandwich bread as any kind of product that Europeans should wish they had :)
The irony that caught my eye in the article is that American mass-produced sandwich bread is depicted as this old-fashioned, slow production process. It takes far too long for the time-crunched futuristic British bakers. Who can wait 5 hours for yeast to ferment? The Chorleywood process comes to the rescue and whips and explodes the water-flour mixture into a foam that is baked seconds later. While those old-fashioned Americans are still waiting for their ancient traditional yeast to slowly do its thing.
At the same time, we have legions of new-age Rogan-adjacent food influencers on both sides of the Atlantic droning on about how American flour makes them bloated and tired (a line that Rogan himself repeats ad nauseam) while European flour avoids all of these problems.
Bread is really a fascinating product.
There are so many things for which modern mass or mass-ish production methods can produce results as good or better than artisanal techniques. Nails, knives [0], textiles, etc are all examples as long as one is considering a modern example that is trying to be good.
But a halfway decent loaf of bread made using hundreds-of-years-old techniques (albeit probably with modern yeast [1] if it’s not sourdough) is just dramatically better than “modern” bread, even though the latter often contains highly engineered ingredients and is made with extreme precision.
[0] I know it’s kind of sad, but a well designed blade cut from a sheet of high quality steel and beveled appropriately is better than even a very, very well made Japanese knife made from the alloys that, for some reason, are still state of the art in Japan. I do imagine that a highly skilled artisan could produce an even better knife from modern steels, but this is a rarity and is very, very expensive.
[1] Actual modern yeast is dramatically better than your average supermarket yeast, in flavor, performance and convenience. In the US market, this means that you should use SAF, not Red Star. Good sourdough starter is still just an artisanal thing.
> "at best, the protein can sometimes be inferred from the nutritional information."
I looked at some recently in the UK and the nutritional information is always per 100g and says e.g. 11.5g protein. Is there something wrong with that meaning 11.5% without any inference, or are continental European nutritional information boxes presented differently?
In the US, at least in larger sized bags, flour seems to be treated as an ingredient and there might not be a nutritional fact label. I admit that I didn’t look that carefully last time I was in a European grocery store.
I imagine that the 11.5g you’re looking at really does mean 11.5%.
Ahh, I am just looking at 1Kg consumer/household bags, maybe commercial huge bags are different.
Maybe this is just a difference in where the label is. I found an actual nutrition fact panel on the flour’s website.
Huh? Processed ingredients don't generally get a pass on nutritional labeling requirements in the US. A bag of flour in a grocery store should have a label.
The European grocery-bought bag of sugar I have lying around has a regular nutritional label, including a list of ingredients. Spoilers: sugar is made out of sugar and contains almost 100g of sugar per 100g.
I checked some 25lb bags of flour (not from a grocery store) and they do not appear to have any nutritional facts label.
Ok, if they're meant to be marketed for food service, like a bakery regardless of who actually purchases them, then that does makes sense.
I consider myself a decent amateur baker and I've never noticed a huge difference in bread flours. I buy from a local mill because they sell interesting grains and I want to support them. Otherwise I get King Arthur, or Bob's Red Mill if I need something a bit more specific. KA is particularly good because their recipes are usually reliable and they're designed around their flours. The selection of baking ingredients is usually much wider in the average US supermarket compared to the average European one in my experience.
> I consider myself a decent amateur baker and I've never noticed a huge difference in bread flours.
If you make sourdough, have a crack at using standard supermarket flour and then try adding some organic stone ground or other expensive flour with special snob factor.
I am far from expert but notice a big difference.
(I’d say to try 100% organic stoneground but getting a good rise can be quite hard).
I once did an experiment in which I baked two otherwise identical loaves, made under as close to identical conditions as I could arrange, very carefully measured, with the only difference being the flour. I used 11.5% protein malted flour and 13.5% protein untreated flour. The breads rose the same amount, looked and tasted basically indistinguishable, but had a dramatic difference in texture. The higher protein bread was more cohesive and resisted falling apart or being pulled apart much more strongly. Maybe I should try the experiment again, better, without any malt involved.
In any case, I think that the basic bread flours from King Arthur and Bob’s Red Mill are decently high in protein. King Arthur Bread Flour is 12.7% and they sell even higher protein flours. Bob’s Red Mill doesn’t obviously list a percentage, but the nutrition facts suggest it’s around 13%.
You can buy pure gluten powder (sold as "vital wheat gluten") and add it to get the equivalent of the Canadian flour.
There are British companies that sell (among other things) flour made from Canadian wheat.
The specific one whose flours I use for my (very amateur) bread baking is Shipton Mill. I tend to make my bread using some of their very strong Canadian flour and some of their others which are weaker but possibly produce more interesting-tasting bread. (I do not guarantee that I would actually notice the difference in a blind test. I haven't tried.) One of the other flours I use is made from some continental-European and some British wheat. Another is all-British.
(I am not personally all that concerned whether my flour-buying supports British businesses; I'm just one person making a small amount of bread for my own family's use and the impact of my flour purchases on the national economy is a rounding error on top of a rounding error.)
As others have said, you could try using not-Canadian wheat and adding some vital wheat gluten. I haven't tried doing this myself but my understanding is that it works about as well as using stronger flour to begin with. It might make your ingredient lists a little less appealing if you're going to be doing this commercially, though.
Amateur bread baker here.
Ships three times a week from Halifax docked at Birkenhead's grain elevator. The flour was then transferred to the mill over the road. British wheat flour (refined) at that point in history (60s) could not get to more than about 9% protein, not really enough to raise a loaf.
Common Market (? 1975) and we have tariffs &c so British wheat gets some serious cross-breeding attention. And now you can get home grown strong white flour above 11.5g. I think there was a similar story with Sugar cane and beet. The old Spillers mill is now flats, and the grain elevator was demolished decades ago.
But, yes, a few of the ships still come and yes you can get Canadian flour at 14 to 15%. One local artisan baker uses French flour as a matter of principle. Others don't specify the source. I'd say develop your recipes and go for it.
During Covid, the local corner shop in London managed to source some amazing Bulgarian white flour. It must have been high protein, and made the best bread. Once supply chains went back to normal, they went back to British and Canadian flours, and my bread has never been as nice.
I stopped preferring British produce when I read about the farmers cheerfully using toxic industrial sludge on their fields: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3e5y85p488o
I guess others are no angels either, but at least they have regulations with teeth and less corrupt politicians.
Just buy what you want and certainly do not _prefer_ British. If they don't care about your health why should you care about their bottom line....
A mixed strategy of say 75% British / 25% Canadian wheat could be an interesting point to explore.
Then, you would get 75% of the local support benefit while having a potentially better product.
(ratios theoretical; you know more than me!)
According to the artickle, even the Chorleywood technique requires some Canadian wheat- it's just that with the mixers they can get it down to 15%.
>work is made easier by using very strong Canadian flour
what is up with Canadian flour? Just recently we were talking to an acquaintance here in Bay Area who makes her own bread from specially ordered Canadian flour.
Any reason you can't just add whatever is missing from the British flour?
Naively: gluten comes from flour, so you're not moving the needle
I suppose you save shipping costs, and I'm aware that flour processed to remove the gluten is prized for cakes.
I add gluten to bread occasionally.
It good when making pizza and makes bread rise nicely.
How do the economics pan out? Do you pay more for gluten at higher purity than the ~10% you get when you buy it in sacks of flour?
The retail case is interesting, although maybe not indicative of wholesale
I suppose this is a function of whether gluten is a usable by-product of making low-protein cake flour. In that case i would expect industrial bread to simply add by-product gluten to cheaper flour. But that might obviate the search for higher-gluten wheat that the article describes. Really, i need more data.
It definitely doesn’t save money.
Tipo 00 is great for making pasta and pizza, but it can be hard to get.
I as 50g or so to a batch of normal bread to help it out. It’s pretty unscientific but it works.
Also: don’t spill it. If makes glue and is hard to clean off. It sets like rock.
Great article, but it's not telling the whole story.
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.
I've got a few pet peeves about bread and American food service. Bread is spongy, and it's designed to sop up liquids and sauces. But when you're served bread in a restaurant, or incorporate a recipe at home, there is seldom time enough, or sauce enough, to soak sufficiently into the bread.
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.
This article makes it sound like a good thing, but bread made using the Chorleywood process is considered as ultra-processed food and studies shows that it can contribute to IBS. IMO This invention has been bad for the UK, causing real bread to become an expensive, and hard to find in some places, specialty.
Brits will pop up like snails in the rain to defend this god awful bread. They'll explain to you for the 15th time that it was a necessity back in the day, or how it's cheaper or faster to make or whatever reason they come up with in the moment. Fellow Brits, we know this, it's ok, it's 2026 the ration times are over. It's time to move on or accept reality.
Right, but that is because it essentially was a necessity. Its fortification also aided in the developmental health of generations of children. Snark about it all you like; it was valuable.
People in fact don't eat dull white sliced bread in anything like the quantity they did. The majority of bread sold might be like that but we just eat less bread full stop.
But first, when you say "this godawful bread", what exactly do you mean? Chorleywood is a process, not an outcome. It's not just the template pre-sliced white/wholemeal/brown loaf thing from the three big brands. Quite a lot of bread you might think is not Chorleywood essentially is.
Go to even a larger French supermarket and buy a baguette, and that will very likely be a Chorleywood-based process. Much in-store-bakery bread is a modified Chorleywood process (if it is not, it is another similarly "ultra-processed" method, apparently called Activated Dough Development).
Most supermarket "sourdough type" bread, even some quite expensive stuff, is a modified Chorleywood process. Most ciabatta are.
I don't really eat "cut loaf" bread anymore for quite immediate health reasons — it invariably causes acid reflux and then skin irritation, so I gave it up a long time back. But I do still eat the odd part-baked bread roll and even some of those are Chorleywood process.
There is a good chance that if you're in a posh café you're still eating a Chorleywood-type bread. Because it is a way of making bread at scale; it is not a single product outcome.
> Most supermarket "sourdough type" bread, even some quite expensive stuff, is a modified Chorleywood process. Most ciabatta are.
I assume this is one reason why most supermarket "sourdough type" bread is, well, not good. (Sure, it's better than the cheapo sliced-white stuff. There's a lot of space between that and actually-good.)
I don't claim to know for sure that no bread made with Chorleywood-type processes is good. I am fairly sure, though, that no bread I've had that I have good reason to suspect was made that way has ever been much good.
(One specific complaint: It tends to have crumb that lacks elasticity. If you try to spread anything fairly thick on it -- soft cheese, say -- it tears and crumbles.If I do the same thing with one of my own loaves, the crumb flexes but doesn't tear or disintegrate. This isn't the only thing I find unsatisfactory about even supposedly fancy supermarket bread, but it's a thing I can describe fairly explicitly rather than just waving my hands and saying "well, it's just not good, you know?".)
> I don't claim to know for sure that no bread made with Chorleywood-type processes is good. I am fairly sure, though, that no bread I've had that I have good reason to suspect was made that way has ever been much good.
I want to say that I also find Chorleywood bread to be "noticeable" somehow, because it feels like it always is compared to my local artisan place, but I have realised this evening while reading about the other common accelerated process used here — ADD — on this impressive page:
https://domson.co.uk/gb/academy/bread-technology/dough-mixin...
… that it might be difficult to tell these two processes apart from each other meaningfully by taste. Whereas the difference from non-industrialised, slow-fermented bread is usually pretty obvious.
(FWIW I do still eat the supermarket sourdoughs along with part-baked things, because the artisan place is less convenient — though it has just started to offer a terrifyingly convenient delivery service -- but mainly I am doing this to slow down my bread consumption even further; ultimately I feel healthier if I eat less bread.)
It's slightly depressing how much better the everyday food is just some 300kms east of London (i.e. in France). I was shocked the first time I pitched up in a random Carrefour and saw that their basic food is an essentially unobtainable level of quality in the UK.
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.
French supermarket baguettes are very often Chorleywood.
USian here, guilty as charged. Although I imagine it's the same as in the U.K. in terms of a lot of people who eat a lot of crap, while there are still plenty of people who know and appreciate good food, including baked goods. So, there is good bread here, but either you make it yourself or pay a premium.
> It's slightly depressing how much better the everyday food is just some 300kms east of London (i.e. in France)
Do you mean south of London?
Would south east do? Is further pedantry necessary?
I'd note that south or southeast would work, even southwest might. But East would clearly lead to the Netherlands. (they may also eat better bread there too, I wouldn't know)
I'll accept south-east.
I'm glad we're not describing the relationship between Greenland and Iceland as Greenland is farther east, west, north and south of Iceland.
I’m not sure that’s true. I’m old enough to remember the great British bread strike of 1977 https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/11045641.look-back-chaos-c...
One of the effects of the strike was that white sliced was in short supply and mangled people ended up with weird granary loaves etc as they were all that was left in the shelves. They liked them.
And from that day granary and seeded breads became a lot more popular over the bland spongy white sliced stuff.
I will say that whatever the failings of white sliced, I still prefer it to over-sweetened US bread.
"separate taps for cold and hot water" (even in public places)
I don't really understand this either. Mixer taps are just better, but I have separate taps in my bath tub despite the block of houses being built in the 2010s. Guess some people like the aesthetic.
Probably not in your bath, but in houses with water tanks at least one of the cold taps will be fed directly from the mains supply. If you are drinking it then you want it straight from the mains rather than from the tank in your loft that’s been sat there for a while and had all sorts of things falling into it
but in houses with water tanks
This is another big surprise to Americans, which went from no running water to high-pressure mains.
... Huh. So, these seem to have totally died out in Ireland, despite us changing the rules on mixers at about the same time as the UK did (Irish plumbing and electrical rules tend to follow UK ones). You'll see them in old installations, but more or less never in modern ones (even modern antique-stylised plumbing has anachronistic mixer taps). Hadn't realised that they were still a thing in the UK.
The reality is that the process is used all round the world these days (as covered in the article), not just in Britain, and its done that by being fast and cheap. It's also doubtful that it's any worse for you than American supermarket breads which are pumped full of sugar, emulsified oils etc etc.
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.
Harsh but true. It's the same phenomenon as defending the BS 1363 power plug that needed an embedded fuse because their domestic postwar electrical wiring was Not Great -- to save on copper.
But we all do this with our own stanky poop.
The plug ain't too bad actually. (And I grew up with European style plugs.)
Still a vastly better mechanical design than what they make you use in the US: they barely hold in the socket.
Yeah BS 1363 is a really weird British standard to pick on, especially in a discussion about our food standards! Well engineered to actually stay in the socket, sockets have safety shutters as well as the earthing which other standards bizarrely lived without and it's not easily confused with a myriad of similar but incompatible standards. The fuse is a non-issue in practical use, and handy if your circuit is high current and your power cord isn't.
People who prefer plugs that are fun to step on are doing electrical interfaces wrong!
They're all horrid to step on, so that's not really worth discussing.
The US plug (NEMA 1-15P is the 2-prong version, or 5-15P for the most common 3-prong grounded) is actually pretty decent. They stay in sockets pretty well if the sockets aren't bottom-of-the-barrel garbage products which, sadly, many things in the US are in general.
What many people miss when comparing US and EU plugs are that they're actually doing fairly different jobs. The 120V mains in the US is significantly less trouble than the 240V in Europe, so you can get away with a lot less mechanically on the plug. The US NEMA 6-15P plug design (the 240V version of the standard plug) is, accordingly, kind of shit. But at least it's rare enough that receptacles tend to be of decent quality, which mitigates a lot. The locking versions (L5-15R etc) are actually quite good, and should almost always be used when possible and appropriate. They're good to 480V and even a bit beyond -- not just working but actually good -- and you can't say that about most EU plug designs. You guys have those horribly bulky pin-and-sleeve disasters and we get nice NEMA locking plugs for our three-phase.
One of the other things that European plugs have to deal with, and US plugs don't, is that European electricians have no idea how to separate hot and neutral wires and basically wire them up randomly. This has major consequences in a lot of product design and is really really annoying when you're trying to build something safe. (Namely: in the US you're often (but not always) not allowed to fuse neutral wires. That makes sense, for safety reasons. You have to fuse hot... but in Europe you don't know which one is hot, so you have to fuse them both. Which means you just fused neutral. Design conflict!) That shows up in the plugs, too; with no idea where hot is, you have to be more careful and can't use neutral to help you out.
British plugs are worse to step on, not because the pins are any worse to have jammed into your foot but because the design of the plugs means that if you leave one unplugged on the floor there's an excellent chance that it ends up in caltrop configuration with the pins pointing upward, whereas a US-style plug is (I think) more likely to end up with the pins pointing sideways where they're less likely to hurt your foot when you step on the plug.
But in all other respects the British mains plug design is really rather good. It does a good job of making partially-plugged-in plugs still safe, it's nice and robust, it readily stays firmly plugged in, etc.; US plugs are much worse in these respects and I think so are typical continental European ones.
US plugs (and similar ones like Japanese and to a lesser extent the Australian ones) are really bad.
European ones mostly stay in the socket. But I guess they ain't quite as cleverly designed as the British ones.
BS 1363 isn't an EU plug though. Doesn't have issues with separation of hot and neutral wires (and does have a fuse for the hot wire built in) and nor is it specified with the idea that electrocution risk is no biggie or that not falling out of walls (a big issue with some Euro plug and socket combinations too) is up to the manufacturer. And having one type of plug for all regular home appliances in the UK and a different one for three phase feels like a more sensible split than the range of 2 and 3 pin options of varying quality and compatibility that CEE7 and NEMA present.
Fair point on BS 1363 not being EU, and about UK electricians not being incompetent (I actually didn't know they were careful unlike the continent -- that's just one of those things that once you have to deal with the insanity that is continental Europe, it doesn't really much matter what else is out there).
But my point about electrocution risk is that 240V is not twice as dangerous as 120V. It's actually much, much worse. And 480V is worse still. We used to say that screwing up 120V will hurt you, 240V will kill you, and 480V will kill you, start your corpse on fire, and blind everyone around you. So the design requirements for all 240V class plugs are much more important.
> not falling out of walls ... is up to the manufacturer
This one is a real problem in the US because there is a standard, it is a good standard, parts are made and tested to the standard, and standards-compliant parts work very well. But few people require the damn standard. If you want good receptacles in the US, get stuff that's marked "Federal Specification W-C-596 rated" (aka "Fed Spec"; "Spec Grade" is self-certified to... something... which is... not the same thing... but in practice the manufacturers seem not to abuse that term too much; often lower-volume part numbers seem only to be available as "Spec Grade" presumably due to testing cost). It will perform well.
For the US, you really need to be careful to get something that doesn't fall out of the plug.
For the British standard, pretty much any plug you can buy will be fine.
As a Brit I will tell you that not all of us like this processed shit that passes for bread.
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”
The peak of British engineering was in the 1990s when I briefly lived there, and you could not buy small appliances with a plug attached. You got the bare wire, and you had to buy a separate plug, and connect it yourself at home.
Of course, any rational British person would instantly understand that the best way to ensure safety is to have every single person wiring up every single plug in their house.
That’s a gross over exaggeration. Most electrical equipment did come with a plug. The white appliances that didn’t was because they were kitchen appliances that either wired into a separate ring, or the wire had to be threaded through small gaps in the kitchen cupboards.
For that last point, I’ve often ended up cutting the plug off new kitchen appliances, thread the cable, then wire a new plug afterwards.
The law changed in 1994 requiring appliances to be sold with the plug attached.
Mostly I’m happy about that, but you can’t remove the plug from dead appliances anymore and keep it (along with the 48 other “spares”) now they are all moulded plastic.
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> defending the BS 1363 power plug that needed an embedded fuse because their domestic postwar electrical wiring was Not Great
Where would you put the fuse, then?
Also, if you think that's "Not Great", just take a look at the concentrated pile of sketchiness that passes for domestic wiring in the US. Every single house in the US is an electrical fire waiting to happen - and with "balloon frame" construction which is purpose-designed to both reduce construction costs and ensure the complete destruction of the building with even a minor fire, you've got plenty for that to work with.
> Where would you put the fuse, then?
In the electrical panels, of course. You'd only need fuses in the plug if you wired up your home with a braindamaged topology like a ring circuit. (Alas, ring circuits are very common in British home wiring.)
> In the electrical panels, of course.
So how do you know what size to fit?
Or do you just get in about your panels and replace them every time you unplug a lamp to plug in a TIG welder?
You'd have a dedicated outlet on a dedicated circuit for the TIG welder. In North America, that dedicated outlet would have a different physical plug shape than your lamp, so as to avoid confusion. Of course, if in the UK you use exactly the same plug shape for both lamp and welder, I can see how that could be unsafe...
Yes, but in America you have a lot of electrical fires, and in the UK, we don't.
I cannot really think of worse bread than pret or that first picture garbage. It's just so horrible compared what I bake at home, but sure, you can keep it for 40 years and it'll still be the same. Apparently people value that over their colon health.
AFAICT the two processing steps that have the most impact are the super fine milling that is used to create modern flour, and the removal of the bran from the flour. Those are likely the same whether you have Chorleywood bread or homemade 4 ingredient bread.
I suspect that Chorleywood bread made with stone ground whole wheat flour is better for you than home made four ingredient white bread. (with the caveat that Chorleywood probably doesn't work with such flour).
yes, long fermentation reduces fodmaps in breads which in turn makes it better digestable (plus it just takes better).
This is true, but I want to add that FODMAPs are not inherently bad for you (unless you have something like IBS), on the contrary!
Fermentable carbohydrates are prebiotics and feed your gut flora, which produces short-chain fatty acids that are healthy for you.
But yes, you also get gas from FODMAPs. And no, I am not advocating for processed foods - just wanted to comment on the FODMAP aspect.
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> This article makes it sound like a good thing
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?
> 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.
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.
> That's just not true.
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.
Supermarket bread in France is also industrial.
I wonder about bakeries too. When traveling in France and elsewhere in Europe, the uniformity of bakery bread has suggested to me that a lot of it is made from a mix.
Dudes, pleas...
Stop obsesing with 2-4% diference in gluten! English flour, Americans flour - just make dough denser and it will keep shape longer before going flat.
Especially if you bake in baking pan! In pan anything keeps bread (actually pan :> ) shape! Corn, buckwheat, rice, whatever.
Without pan "week gluten" make bread flat. But on the other hand week gluten flour is better for cakes makers.
Without gluten and pan you can make pancakes-like bread what still is called bread in some current but ancient traditions.
O, and "wheat only bread" started to be so popular (as in: be only one thing called bread) only when yeasts has been discovered and only in West Europe / North America culture. Even Germany still is using a lot of rye and Mexico is using a lot of corn...
And to article subject: yea, mixing harder adds a lot of air into dough and when heated gas expands so bread "grows"... And, especially in pan, it looks "normal"... But intensive mixing also kills yeasts that create CO^2 in dough so it kills bread growth... So, yeah, you realy need that gluten so air is trapped in the dough :)
Also short bread growth time kills taste... But you can faster push whatever-you-are-making to customers!
And that suposedly "american" "sponge-and-dough" is just ancient and global way of making bread...
All I want to know is why are Parisian baguettes so good? From this article I get that they are a low-gluten bread. But can that be all? I've always suspected a secret variety of wheat.
In all my life and travels I've never had bread nearly as good as the French baguette and I've always wondered why.
French bread is just normal bread, while most other places seem to use the Chorleywood process now, which produces something different.
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.
I don't think that's the only reason. Here in Germany, you can also buy that fluffy white bread—usually wrapped in plastic—that's probably made that way. But most bread in Germany is still produced the traditional way, especially since it's often not pure wheat bread but rather rye bread or mixed-grain bread. Still, a real French baguette is unbeatable. Maybe it's the quality of the flour. But I'm sure it's mainly the very long resting time before baking. In my experience, that's also what makes pizza dough especially soft and flavorful.
You can get soft bread in Norway that is much like the stuff that is ubiquitous in the UK but it is marketed for making toast. Most of the rest is much more interesting, and I'm sure better for you.
You can buy non-chorleywood bread from bakers and from most supermarkets in the UK (look for their 'sourdough' loaves, some might even give a fermentation time)
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...)
It is mostly the freshness. There is a reason it all comes from small local bakeries - it has to be made that morning. Even by the afternoon it will not be as good.
I learned to bake when I lived in London, because the average bread was simply awful. It's surprisingly easy to get something as good at home, as long as you have a decent dutch oven.
It really makes me wonder what else is going on everywhere else, because it really comes down to just flour, water, salt, and yeast.
The process is more important than the ingredients.
I thought so too. When I started, I was obsessed with getting every variable and every step of the process just right. I measured and documented everything: The number of folds, the humidity in the room ...
Then I discovered Jim Lahey's no-knead bread recipe, which gave me virtually the same results, for a grand total of 5 minutes of active work.
Socrates always used to inspect his dough before adding the yeast. The unexamined loaf is not worth leaven.
Long, slow fermentation using cultured yeast and a special Viennese style steam oven are essential for baguettes. They traditionally use soft French flour, but I'm not sure it makes the difference. The downside of baguettes is they don't last more than a day, but that's ok in France because there's a boulangerie on every corner. Baguettes are not homemade bread. Brioche is homemade and just as wonderful and far better than the garbage Brits/Americans make and call brioche for their burger buns.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0U8RdRdFDU
do this. thank me later. (yes, it takes multiple days!). as good as when we hop over to France.
The strain of yeast, and the local water have a pretty big impact on the finished bread (in addition to the flour used, obviously).
I don’t know how common it is in France, but you can ferment a baguette for 3 days and it makes a big difference.
Long fermentation with little sourdough is making a come back in France (e.g the Respectus Panis thing) but I would think it's harder to apply to baguettes for professional bakers looking at how many they churn a day. That would be a lot of proofing bread to store.
It's usually less about a secret wheat variety and more about the specific flour grading (like French T65) and a strict traditional process.
The long, slow fermentation allows those complex flavors to develop naturally. Combine that high hydration with a really hot, steam-injected oven, and you get the sudden expansion needed for that perfect crispy crust and open crumb...
For some reason I read this in James Burke's voice and I could swear I was teleported back to the 80's watching a hitherto unseen episode of Connections.
Interesting stuff.
I'm sure this was a very interesting article but after 7 paragraphs telling me that bread had changed in this one weird way, but not yet telling me how, it started feeling like marketing and I couldn't read more.
I guess I'll never find out why the bread in Europe also has holes.
I agree, what a chore to read.
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."
Goodness thanks for taking a terrible article and getting to the point.
Alas, Chorleywood tastes awful. At least to German taste buds.
I imagine almost all other bread tastes awful to German taste buds.
And imho the British kind, especially, does not even deserve to be called by the same name.
British food before roughly WW2 wasn't so bad actually.
The French have some decent bread, if you can live without the taste of rye for a while.
... but if you buy my book with more of this, I'll send you even more to read!
I get it, sometimes it's fun to follow a story. But I also read a dozen or so paragraphs, then started scrolling, then gave up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process is a more focused article about it.
That was interesting. Highlights for me:
> 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.
Reading through this page...
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.
This word bloat is why I can rarely read non-fiction books even if their topic is interesting. I want the summary and then option to read more detail if I want, not have to go through pages and pages of padding before getting to the interesting ideas or facts. There was interesting information in the article but the idea that it takes up a third of his book, with multiple interviews about the process is the opposite, is exactly what I'd avoid reading.
You're not reading the right non fiction books.
I at least appreciate he was up front about advertising his book.
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.
I think this is a result of click-bait titles. The title primes you to find out about the "little holes in your bread", so you start reading to find out about that and of course they leave that info to the end. It reminds me of the way so many YouTube videos will talk round and round the subject before getting to the actual point.
I lost interest too. I could grow grain grind it, and make bread before I finished the article.
You were half way there!
> 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.
This is the kind of writing that I assume the people who read the NYT or Atlantic enjoy.
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.
Indeed, what an arduous read.
Absolutely. I will never waste my time with slop that doesn't get to the point. This is a lousy blog post about bread, not a great novel.
What absolute slop. I don't even know if anything in this is true. And an article with a title about little holes contains multiple photos of bread, none of which actually show the holes? I would be embarrassed if someone I knew put their name on something like this.
YouTube is infested with lede burying as well. I hate it.
> More to the point, the ciabatta depends for its production on modern breadmaking techniques, chief among them high-hydration doughs. And in order to pull off high hydration doughs you need “strong” modern flours with very high gluten and protein levels. And for the most part, even in Italy, those flours have to be imported.
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.
Yes, but when done in industrial (or store) setting they use processes that go faster than what you use at home. Those processes needs the extra protein.
That actually makes no sense. This article disputes this claim as well.
Also you can certainly make a high hydration dough with 11% protein flour but it'll probably be mediocre at best. I highly doubt it'll be worth the effort you'd need to put into it versus a higher protein flour.
ah, that makes sense, thanks
I read about the Chorleywood Bread Process in a book out of the library at a time when I was making a bunch of bread: it was the year 1993.
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.
> The whole idea is to make the largest-looking bread possible using the smallest amount of solid material, in the least amount of time
Good old post-WW2 poverty thinking that never went away because profit
It's as if the author, having come across a fairly interesting topic, decided to see how poorly hen could write about it.
People complain a lot about AI written articles, but is this any better? I don't think so, I don't care who authors it but I don't want discursions and distractions.
Some blog posts could have just been a link to the related wikipedia page[1] and some are just clearly a re-written version of that (goes for "content" on YT from some of the better known history ones).
It's still better than slop though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process
I was hoping this would be about a new way to augur the events of the day from my morning toast to ensemble with the tea leaves at the bottom of my morning cuppa, alas ...
I guess, this explains why British and American breads taste awful. I know it's subjective, but this is how most people feel in contonental Europe.
>> You realise the extent to which the world around is sometime quite precariously perched on these supply chains.
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.
Unless you lived thousands of years ago, there was a supply chain. For bread there was a farmer, a miller, and a baker. That's a supply chain. And they were even more profit hungry back then, adulterating the flour with fillers to save money.
You assume that everyone eats bread, like most westerners do.
The rural families a few decades ago in most Asian countries did not need millers, bakers or any other salesmen.
Are you being sarcastic?
They are not being sarcastic. My grandparents lived in a place like this - the old ways have been forgotten by most but in my family you only have to go back two generations before it's all pretty much living off the land...
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