Bread

BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme was about bread this week. I guess it’s still available to ‘listen again’ for a while. They were reporting from an Oxford conference titled The Rise of Real Bread. To quote the flyer:

Nothing, but nothing, is more important than bread. Truly it is the staff of life.

Yet the majority of Britain’s bread is highly processed, packed with additives and designed to be as cheap as possible with the emphasis on shelf-life rather than on nutritional quality and flavour.

This day looks at the food supply chain behind Britain’s mass-produced bread and asks whether it could be improved. Can we support local farmers, millers and bakers to grow and bake with better crops and in turn make good, natural bread accessible to all?

The conference was organised by The Real Bread Campaign. The programme makes the point that bread is important, has been at the heart of food and therefore the heart of society for centuries. It is also simple, only contains flour, water, yeast and a small amount of salt. The community aspect was stressed as much as the actual product. The bread discussed was made by local, community bakeries and in one case distributed by the local pub! Bread making was described as a craft.

These artisan breads aren’t cheap though, over £2 a loaf in many cases. Perhaps twice the price of a supermarket 800 gram, but it was suggested by one foody academic that apart from the very poorest in society the majority are more and more buying food on value rather than absolute cost. I can believe that.

Well, with my new found enthusiasm I had a go. Here’s loaf number one:

I don’t have a loaf tin (yet) so it’s rather blob shaped. Smells and tastes great, so far so good!