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.

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.

When holidaying in Croatia the bakers there would trim loaves to the size you wanted, so if you just wanted a bit rather than a massive loaf you could. Wish they did the same here.

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 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.

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.