The New English Kitchen: Changing the Way You Shop, Cook and Eat

1 bread and flour

Bread can pull off a feat that few cooked foods are capable of: as it matures, it develops new and interesting uses. In other words, it ages gracefully. Once past its sandwich era, older bread fits easily into simple recipes: it lies beneath radiant vegetable broths, turns up in a bread, red wine and onion soup, blends smoothly into a clove-infused sauce, and can be sweetly saturated by a creamy, eggy custard with spices and fruit. There’s always toast, too, an edible plate for favourite things. The bread that can do all this is not sliced and wrapped, sometimes costing little more than a first-class stamp, but made in the slower tradition. This bread has real integrity but it costs a bit more – which is why it is worth knowing how to use it as it ages.

The life of a good loaf of bread could unfold in the following way. On day one, it is as fresh as can be, the interior deliciously elastic and the crust crisp as an eggshell. A day or two later the crumb begins to dry, the crust to soften, and it’s good for toast. Toast brushed with flavoured oil, then topped with salad leaves and soft fresh cheese; toast with creamy scrambled egg and marinated fish; or, best of all, toast spread with real beef dripping from yesterday’s roast. Next day, put a slice of the now drying bread into a bowl and ladle over some vegetable broth. Or, if you are having a supper party, you might use the bread to make a toffee pudding or a fruit charlotte. By the end of the week, anything left from the loaf can be made into breadcrumbs. Eat them spiked with lemon zest beside roast poultry or game; mix them with garlic, herbs and olive oil for stuffing vegetables; or store them in the freezer for bread sauce. By now, I think it would be safe to say your loaf has earned its keep. You bought it to make a sandwich and it has contributed to at least four meals.

The economics of bread have an interesting pattern. A loaf of sliced, wrapped bread costs about 50 pence – although supermarket price wars have seen it drop down to 20 pence as a ‘loss leader’. Better-grade, high-street-baked sliced white costs about £1. Handmade traditional bread is twice that, at around £2, but a loaf made at home with best-quality flour costs about 50 pence – again.

This leaves two choices: buy better, more expensive bread and learn how to reap more from it – as the recipes in this chapter will show – or bake bread at home and spend no more than usual. Obviously there’s yet more to gain from baking your own bread and letting it earn its keep as it ages. I look at it this way: the time investment made when baking bread at home rewards you financially, leaving you more money to spend on other things. Having said that, it occurs to me that it is in fact quicker to make good bread than to go off and seek it out. Bread machines have made it easier still for busy people. But, putting the economics to one side, you can take real satisfaction in the fact that the bread you make in your own home will be the best. Unadulterated, wholesome bread is something of an endangered species nowadays …

the currency of bread

If the essence of this book is to know the value of food and make the most of it, then bread is the currency. Bread is money. It is slang for money and when you’re on the breadline you have run out money. Two bestselling books that differ in their account of the value of bread wryly tickle. In Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt (Flamingo, 1996), a poverty-stricken boy glimpses through a Limerick window a piece of bread spread with jam. His mouth-watering description of it is enough to prove that even at a young age he knows the value of bread. The other book, Dr Atkins’ New Diet Revolution (Vermilion, 1999), advises avoiding bread – or carbohydrates. Dr Atkins says that mixing carbs with protein, or meat, makes us obese – and so bread must be banished. It goes without saying that Dr Atkins’ book is not a bestseller in the developing world. It walks off the shelves in Britain and America, however, because most of these countries’ inhabitants are rich enough not to need bread.

the giant bread machine

‘All our bakers are master bakers,’ the factory manager told me. At that moment a master baker, dressed in regulation cover-up clothing, pushed a button and the bread production line swung into action.

Real master bakers are trained to use their hands to judge the texture of the dough, feeling its elasticity and warmth. They learn their trade in high-street bakeries or medium-sized bread wholesalers, where the bread is made at night. After leaving school, I worked as a shop assistant in a traditional bakery for nearly two years. The baker arrived at one in the morning to start the baking and clocked off at 8 a.m., half an hour after we turned the door sign to read ‘open’. The hardship of beginning work at 7 a.m. was tempered by that gorgeous smell of bread emerging from the oven. As I walked to the bakery in the dark early morning, the aroma grew gradually more powerful until I was close enough to see a spectre of steam puffing out of the basement. The baker, Steve, who had spent time ‘inside’ after a fight, controlled his aggression with an interest in martial arts. But he also loved to bake. He liked the science and enjoyed using his skill – judging the readiness of the dough at every stage, shaping it by hand, and baking it in a century-old brick oven. He even liked to be up at night working while everyone else slept. His hours were strictly controlled by his trade union, in spite of his lonely job. Any slight alteration to the weekly timetable was subject to intense negotiation: well-muscled Steve versus a skinny shop manager, hell bent on not provoking the baker to lose his temper.

In the Midlands factory I visited many years later, the bakers use their hands only to push buttons during their eight-hour shift. This bread is made via the Chorleywood Process, the revolutionary high-speed mechanical baking system invented in 1961. The factory never rests, baking around the clock. It takes just one and three-quarter hours for a loaf to make its journey along the production line, helped by extra yeast and water and high-speed mixers. It is necessary to add flour ‘improvers’, usually in the form of soya flour, to ensure that the bread will literally rise to the occasion in such an artificially short space of time. Enzyme processing aids, softening agents, sugars, fats and preservatives are also sometimes added. These ingredients combine to speed up the natural breadmaking process, resulting in a soft, sweetish loaf with a long shelf life, which fits neatly into the modern maxim that shopping should happen just once a week.

And where do you, the consumer, fit in? The bread factories would say that all this is done for your benefit. This is the bread you want, and indeed for many, soft, sweet bread is easy to like; children in particular are swiftly seduced.

The high-tech mechanisation of bread comes at the cost of its integrity, however. Compare factory-produced bread to Italian dried durum wheat pasta, most of which is now made speedily in giant factories. The mixing is done high in their ceilings, the dough passes through giant tubes, is pressed through the various dies that make the shapes and then travels into vast drying machines that imitate the Neapolitan sun and sea breezes. But it still contains just flour and water. Pasta is perfect for mechanisation – the food itself never loses its integrity. Bread, on the other hand, needs a whole lot of help by way of additives if it is to survive the Chorleywood palaver.

bread in society

When I criticised sliced and wrapped bread in a newspaper for the first time, it provoked a reaction from the industry that both surprised and annoyed me. Their letters of complaint did not exactly defend their process; instead, they justified it by saying that it ‘allowed everyone to eat cheap white bread’. This polemic takes us back over 140 years, when refined white bread had status. The upper classes ate white bread, the poor could afford only the rough, wholegrain type. Flour was ground between stones and then painstakingly sifted to remove the wheatgerm, leaving the flour pure and white – an expensive process.

Then roller mills were invented and suddenly white flour was cheaper to produce. The china rollers removed the brown (good) bits in the flour efficiently. This flour was the forerunner of our modern sliced and wrapped bread. It did indeed give cheap white bread to the poor, but I find it sickening that the modern industry is still arguing that this is the point of high-speed mechanisation. I believe that what it is really saying is: ‘You’re poor, so you get bread with additives, too much yeast, and no flavour; its integral goodness has been milled out, artificial vitamins have been added to replace it – but you can lump it because you are eating white bread, you lucky people.’

Food snobbery is alive and well, sadly. And highly divisive. There is still one form of nutrition for one group in society and one for another. What can you say in a country that still has two different words for the meal eaten in the middle of the day?

Mechanised breadmaking is no longer about feeding everyone white bread; it is about profit. It is about producing more for less, faster – and to hell with breadmaking tradition. But breadmaking, just like winemaking or rearing a beef steer naturally, is a slow process that yields results that are worth the wait. The recipes in this chapter help to solve the problem of how to afford good bread. They show that bread can be made inexpensively and retain its integrity, and they also show how to use every last crumb. This is bread for all.

how to recognise good bread

There has been a definite surge of interest in handmade or craft bread. This is bread made in the traditional way with two fermentations, during which time it builds true flavour. Good flour is essential. Bread made from stoneground flour retains wheatgerm, even if the ‘brown’ has been sifted out. Some bakers are interested again in good flour, in the slower baking process and also in traditional ovens – there are now commercial bakeries with domed brick ovens, offering all kinds of loaves made from a wide variety of grains.

When you buy bread, take a good look at it. The crust should not be too thick but its outer veneer should be brittle and crisp. The shape should be as the baker intended – bread that has been hurried will have a lopsided appearance where the interior has risen too fast, breaking through the crust. Smell the bread, too. The aroma of new baking should cling to a fresh loaf. Once it begins to fade, your bread is ready to use for toast or in recipes.

Feel the bread. The interior crumb should have elasticity, tearing when pulled rather than breaking. Despite its bubbly appearance, it should feel heavy for its size. Compare the weight of a piece of factory-produced sliced bread to a similar-sized slice of bread made with stoneground flour at traditional speed. Dry, crumbly bread has either been incorrectly made or is no longer fresh.

Finally, when you taste the bread, you should be able to detect the flavour of the grain. Even in white bread, if the flour is stoneground the flavour will be enhanced by traces of the oils that remain in it, and which are diminished in ordinary, roller-milled flour. Good bread will also taste ripe, indicating that it has been given a good long time to rise. This is most pronounced in sourdough bread, which undergoes a lengthy fermentation.

where to buy bread

organic bread and good flour

Many new craft bakers use organic flours milled with wheat that has been grown naturally. Organic grain farmers are permitted to use a very few fertilisers and pesticides that are deemed safe, but this is often criticised by the conventional food industry. However, it is undeniable that traditionally made bread using organic flour tastes wonderful. The technique is partly responsible for the flavour, but with organic flour the species of wheat also has an impact.

Organic farmers tend to use traditional grain varieties that are slow to grow but are more resistant to pests and disease. Some claim that the good health of the soil has an impact on the flavour of food. This makes sense, but the organic sector would be the first to say that more research is needed into the flavour and vitality of organic food. Independent research needs Treasury money – something that has not exactly been forthcoming since the popularity of organic food has quadrupled in recent times.

All craft bakers are interested in the flour they use because flour is bread’s personality, its character. A craft baker will seek out good-quality flour, which may or may not be organic, for the greater good of the bread they bake. There is one simple way to find out – ask them. Good food producers love to talk about the food they make.

making bread at home

I make bread twice a week in a food mixer with an attached dough hook. Each batch of two loaves takes ten minutes to mix and knead. Two hours later I shape it, and about an hour later the bread is baked. There is very little physical work – bread needs your presence more than anything else. People who go out to work will find breadmaking machines useful. Alternatively you can make the dough in a mixer, put it in the fridge for the day and shape and bake it when you get home.

hands versus machine

Making bread by hand is a real pleasure, but you will need to set aside a good 15 minutes to knead the dough. Food mixers make smooth, elastic dough. I have a KitchenAid but have also used a Kenwood mixer in the past. Use mixers fitted with a dough hook on a low setting.