WHY REAL BREAD?

What is real bread?

The simple answer is this, from the Real Bread Campaign:

Real Bread is that made without the use of processing aids or any other artificial additives.*

But apart from these ‘real bread’ should contain just flour, water, salt and yeast (either commercial or a homegrown sourdough starter). Sounds simple. And if all bread was made this way then that would be it. But it isn’t, so the longer answer would be to say why we at B arts think real bread is important.

It’s better for us.

As well as being without the many additives and agents that commercially made bread has, in real bread the gluten in the flour has time to fully develop via a long proving process. Andrew Whitley, one of the founders of the Real Bread Movement, writes about how the industrial bread-making process developed fifty years ago at Chorleywood, and now used in all mass-market baking, has turned our bread into an industrial product:

The so-called Chorleywood Bread Process (CBP), invented in 1961 and now used to make most industrial bread, has turned out to be a culinary and digestive disaster. Traditionally, most bread was fermented (allowed to rise) for many hours, often overnight. The CBP used high-energy mixers and a slew of chemicals to make a very white loaf in double-quick time.

Only if you let dough ferment for long enough can naturally occurring beneficial bacteria work to make the bread more digestible, nutritious and tasty. Most British bread is made too quickly for these bacteria to have a chance. Fermenting dough for six hours as opposed to 30 minutes removes around 80% of a potentially carcinogenic substance called acrylamide found in bread crusts, and long yeast fermentations conserve the highest levels of B vitamins in dough.

Not only bakers, but millers too come into the picture. Here’s Andrew again:

In the past 50 years, wheat has been aggressively hybridised to yield more and to go better (bigger, quicker) through the mixers, moulders and ovens of industrial baking..…Millers rip the grain apart and leave so little vitality in their basic white flour that the law insists they add four synthetic nutrients in a vain attempt to make good the deficit.

So choosing a bread made with fewer than 19 ingredients ( check out the label on that loaf of factory made sliced bread) is not a faddish luxury but a sensible, fundamental health based choice.

It’s better for our environment

The negative effects of the supermarketisation of our food - bought once a week, with an increasing emphasis on packaged and prepared foods, have been well commented on in recent years. Bread sales from the mass market producers are falling year-on-year. However of the 12 million loaves produced every day in the UK, we waste 75,000 tonnes every year ( figures from WRAP). Bread ranks as the most thrown away food in the UK, much of it unopened, consigned to landfill still in its plastic wrapping. Real bread is more

filling so we buy, and consume less, and has a natural (minimum) five day cycle of usability (who doesn’t like toast?).

Independent food shops, offering fresh food sourced locally are a vital part of encouraging better dietary and eating habits, and more sustainable local communities. Bread In Common will employ local bakers and staff, use locally-sourced supplies, and offer a local bread alternative to the mass-market bread offered by the national chains.

It’s better for our communities

In addition to having bread to buy at our bakery, we will also be encouraging social baking - through Bread Clubs in community settings around the city that encourage people to come together once a week to bake together. This is a habit that is found across Europe and other parts of the world and is already embedded in our language- the root of the word “companion” is the person with whom we break bread (Latin- com panis- literally “with bread”).

So, we don’t want to criticise other bread-makers, but believe that having a choice is important.

We don’t believe that real bread has to be pretentious or the preserve of wealthier communities. Stoke-on-Trent, like everywhere else in the UK, deserves better bread.

We don’t want to do something because it’s on trend, instead we want to support people, by sharing skills, knowledge and availability, to take back the power over the food on our tables.

What better place to start than with bread.

Find out more:

The Real Bread Campaign http://www.sustainweb.org/realbread/

Bread Matters http://www.breadmatters.com/

*Fortificants must be added to all UK &EU produced, flours. The fortificants are;calcium carbonate (chalk),iron, thiamin (vitamin B1) and nicotinic acid or nicotinamide

www.breadincommon.com

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