Real bread versus the other stuff

One of the problems with most bread is the high salt content and this has featured in another Which? Conversation. Most of us should be eating less salt to avoid increasing our blood pressure.

It is the sodium in sodium chloride (table salt) that causes the problem and various products (Lo Salt is the best known brand) containing mainly potassium chloride have been on the market for years to help us decrease our sodium intake. I do not understand why bakeries do not use these products, which are cheap and could be of benefit to anyone wanting to avoid the need to take pills for blood pressure control.

I’d rather have no bread than eat supermarket cardboard. I’m lucky I’ve got an excellent, long-established deli-bakery near me and their bread is a treat each time and not too expensive either. I must say that I don’t know anything about the ingredients, however. I’m hoping that because I eat bread in small quantities I’m not slowly getting poisoned.

When I lived in Haarlem, at the end of my street there were at least 3 different bakeries. You could choose from the ace selection there or go to the out of town (Albert Heijn) and buy cardboard.

Similarly in Duesseldorf, cardboard from the supermarkets yet fantastic selections from multiple bakeries throughout the city.

I prefer real bread, but if there aren’t many local bakeries around how can we not go to the supermarket?

Sawdust [cellulose,cellulose gum, powdered cellulose, microcrystalline cellulose, etc.] is widely used as a ‘filler’ for bread.
Mixed with flour, it bulks it out but cannot be digested by us and has no nutritional value.
This form of cellulose is waste & thus far cheaper than flour.

I buy my bread from the local bakery in my village, I wouldn’t even feed mass produced bread to animals.

I bake my own bread now and it surprised me just how easy it really is. I often use my Kenwood Chef to knead the dough so it doesn’t even take much skill to make – just a bit of planning on a Friday evening to give the dough time to rise before I bake it not long before bedtime. That way I have fresh bread for the weekend and know exactly what goes into it. I often make an extra loaf, slice it and freeze it so I can take it out one slice at a time as I want it through the week when I haven’t got the time to bake it fresh. As I’m careful about the flour and yeast I buy I know exactly what is in my bread too.

I have been eating Kingsmill 50/50 and yesterday, towards the end of the loaf, I could smell a solvent/chemical odour. I was eating the slice with a tin of fish and thought the smell was coming from there. However, further scrutiny confirmed it was from the bread. Because I’d already eaten a slice, I slightly panicked and telephoned Kingsmill who immediately knew the problem. They said it was because the loaf was getting stale and that there was nothing to worry about. However, I have not experienced that before with the previous loaves. The point is:what was in the bread to make it smell like that? I’ve now gone off it and am considering buying a breadmaker.

I usually bake my own bread to my own recipe without salt (I found food tastes better without any salt at all) The only salt I now consume is in the tiny amount of processed food I eat – But I do like Warburtons Seeded Loaf – eat about one loaf in two or three months.

Cannot get decent bread anywhere. The bread, both wholemeal and white, is:

a} Insubstantial
b] Like foam or cloud
c] “Unreal” in texture and taste.
d] Pasty – one bite sticks to roof of mouth like god knows what.
e] Horrible in every way!

Where can I get proper bread??

A lot of people make their own bread these days. Some use a machine and others, as I do, make it entirely by hand. At the end of the day, providing you don’t buy that really cheap sliced cotton wool, it is no dearer than buying from the supermarket baker. We always had ‘real bread’ when I was a boy. One of my daily errands was to go up to the bakers shop at the top of our street and bring back a fresh baked bloomer. By the time I got home – just a few minutes away – at least one corner of the loaf had had it’s crust picked away. My treat for going! My favourite flour is Canadian extra strong white with a mix of Canadian whole meal. I use the French method of kneading and it turns out fantastic. As we don’t eat a lot of bread because of diet, I bake two small loaves a week. When they have cooled, I cut them and freeze 4 slices per food bag, withdrawing them only when we need them. That way they are always fresh.

Yes, it is easier to buy from the grocer or Supermarket, but it is far more healthier to bake your own, adding only the necessary amounts of yeast, sugar and salt required for the recipe. Who knows what else goes into industrial bread?

We bake most of the bread we eat, using a bread maker. But I make our own recipes, as in my view if you use the ones supplied with the machine, what comes out at the end is not all that different from shop-bought bread. We all prefer a much denser, chewier loaf than the standard type produced by the bread maker. So in the wholemeal bread I make I use part Allinson’s wholemeal wheat, but also a high proportion of Dove’s rye flour. This means the loaf ends up quite heavy and dense, much more like Continental rye bread. It gets cut in quite thin slices. I also sometimes make real continental rye bread, but not in the bread maker.

I also make a special loaf for breakfast that has a lot of oat bran and oat germ in it, plus seeds. It’s lovely, though I say it myself.

But I do also love M&S’s Ciabatta. I bake it until it has a really good crust on it, and eaten hot it seems as good as anything you could want. I can’t make successful ciabatta; I’ve tried lots of times. I know in theory exactly how it should be done; it just never works for me.