written by Ben Miller on July 30, 2010
I love great bread. I love eating it with proper artery-choking butter. I love it with Marmite and with lemon curd. The smell of baking bread is in my top three smells (what are yours?).
Lots of people eat bread (about 75% of us eat it every day) but I wonder how many people really like what they eat? We are not exactly renowned for baking good bread in the UK. Bread needs only three essential ingredients (flour, water, yeast, plus optional salt) and yet that seems far too simple a task for our industrial bakers, who strive for ever-greater “efficiency” and manipulation of basic bread design.
I challenge you to go into your regular supermarket or corner shop and look at the ingredients list on a standard loaf of mass-produced bread. You’ll see a list of up to a dozen artificial additives desperately trying to make the bread lighter, whiter, softer, sweeter and fresher for longer. In many cases, nutrients removed by bad flour-milling practices are added back in artificially for the ‘healthy’ brand in the range.
Last year saw the launch of the Real Bread Campaign, which has been set up to encourage more people to demand real bread. As well as the bread itself, we clearly need more local bakeries using locally-sourced ingredients, and for that we need more apprenticeships and schemes to encourage young people to get interested, get the skills and get into business.
In Edinburgh at the moment we largely leave the provision of our fanciest and most wholesome bread to the likes of German bakers Falko Konditormeister and the Swedish Peter’s Yard. Despite the incredible quality of bread from these sort of places, they charge what are clearly premium prices of around £2-4 a loaf. Understandably, we keep buying the cheap stuff even though it’s bland, unfilling and generally unnutritious. We need good tasty bread that is affordable for most people.
August 1st marks the historical festival of the wheat harvest known as Lammas. The origins of the festival are unclear, but it is likely that an earlier Celtic festival (Lùnastal in Modern Gaelic) became adopted by the Christian church. On Lammas Day, it is traditional to bake a loaf with the freshly-harvested first crop of wheat.
This Sunday, why not try baking a loaf yourself or with friends and family? There are plenty of easy recipes available on the internet and the satisfaction of taking your own loaf out of the oven can’t be overstated!
P.S. Yes those are bread slippers. Kind of cool but also a bit odd.
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