March 20, 2024 - 6:37am
the cost of a loaf of bread
This article from The Guardian got me thinking about how the industrialization of baking & the modern market system effectively ended the tradition of bread riots -- which were a common thing through the early modern era.
If we didn't have comparatively cheap mass-produced loaves, would the price of good bread come down? And would people riot if it didn't?
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An interesting article, but plenty of inaccuracies; eg "The white sliced requires large amounts of water, is high in salt".
Actually UK supermarket white sliced will mostly have a lower salt content than Artisan bakers' bread and the hydration is generally lower.
And "yeasts and lactic acid that live on the surface of cereal grains"??
I'm no champion of supermarket bread, but people writing articles like these need to get their facts right.
Lance
to be fair, I had lots of problems getting basic baking facts straight when I started this journey. I'm a reporter & I'm glad Rachel Dixon wrote this piece.
SC said, "If we didn't have comparatively cheap mass-produced loaves, would the price of good bread come down?"
How could enough "good bread" be made to feed an entire country, without mass production?
the French have done pretty well on that score. The 1993 Décret Pain requires that baguettes are made of Ken Forkish's 4 ingredients -- flour water salt yeast -- and must be made on the premises where they're sold. Though the number of boulangeries has dropped by 40% since the 70s, there are still 35,000 of them and they sell 6 billion baguettes a year.
sources:
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/how-buy-bread-french-way#
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2022/12/01/french-baguette-earns-protected-un-heritage-status/?sh=76b4243058a6
Even if other countries don't have that kind of bread-baking tradition, the question is what would it take to make better bread the norm & have it be priced so people can afford it.
I understand this is hard. I read somewhere that, a decade or so ago, when Maison Kayser came to NY (they shut during the pandemic & never reopened), their biggest challenge was pricing their loaves. They wanted to sell their baguettes for $2 but their local consultants nixed that, insisting that no one would buy them because NYers expected bread to be expensive.
Rob
How can anyone make and sell with profit a loaf costing 45p (0.45gbp/0.57usd)? The supermarkets are using it as a loss leader and low cost tastless supermarket bread is a trap that the UK can never escape from.
If you tried to increase the quality and hence price of bread then the cry will go up "what about the poor people?" - from non-poor people, of course.
It is the curse of the Chorleywood process that has got us into this position and destroyed the UK craft bakers in the 1960s - many of whom made excellent quality bread.
Lance
For many decades starting in the later 19th century, much British mass market bread was made by injecting CO2 gas into highly worked dough in a high pressure vessel at 200 psi (13 X atmospheric pressure), then squirting the liquid gasified dough into loaf pans and baking at once. No yeast involved. The gas was produced by dissolving chalk in sulfuric gas. The process was developed by one John Dauglish in the 1860s and the bread was made by the Aerated Dough Company.
Chorleywood is only one in a line of industrial bread processes.
TomP
I lean social anarchist -- but this tale of wheat paste whipped with co2 makes me say 'there oughta be a law.'
Rob
This idea is still very much alive - Here's a European patent for what sounds like much the same process -
https://data.epo.org/publication-server/document?iDocId=4620988&iFormat=0
A inventor from Russia and a lawyer from Latvia -- two countries with distinguished sourdough rye traditions. Say it ain't so.
I'm going to play devil's advocate…
When flour, sugar, maybe some butter or oil, and salt are injected with CO2 from buttermilk and sodium bicarbonate (or even worse, we also inject it with CO2 made from sodium bicarbonate and phosphoric acid or aluminum compounds!) and baked immediately, we call it Irish Soda Bread and happily eat it!
Is that really so different from the Aerated Bread?
I agree with you and I do make soda bread sometimes. Of course, at home soda bread doesn't have the strength of a kneaded dough, but the injection method lets the manufacturers avoid that limitation. But I like fermentation flavors, even if they are only from commercial yeast with a short mix/bulk/proof cycle.
This Chef Lando owns Enclave Cafe whose motto is "food as medicine", so she is no fan of white store bread.
In the lab, she replicates Wonder Bread down to every chemical. It's quite amusing (she wears safety googles while making it). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdfn-7rStcI
Personally, I like white bread and I like it as soft as possible.
I recently saw a video that explained why Wonderbread-style breads are different from home-baked. It included some requirements that had never occurred to me. Some of them:
- The bread must be soft and fluffy but not tear when substances like peanut butter are spread on it.
- The bread must not get soggy or fall apart when sandwiches are made with, say, jelly or other moist fillings.
- The crust must be perfectly soft because apparently that's what most US buyers want.
- The bread must be soft so that the contents of a sandwich will not squeeze out when bitten through.
- The bread must resist staling and drying out. So moisture-retaining and anti-starch-retrograding chemicals are added. Sugars help with this; it's not just for sweetness.
- The bread must resist getting moldy.
- Then there are all the manufacturability matters, like getting the dough to stand up to the enormous stresses of high-speed mechanical mixing, and inflating a lot to get light and fluffy inside. These require various dough conditioners.
Miracles of manufacturing and industrial engineering! Too bad taste and healthy food are not part of the requirements.
I saw that same video. But the reason I was searching, then found it, was to understand the mysteries of poolish. I was fascinated to learn that modern bread resulted from the mechanical mixers, and the development of dry yeast. The fast rising pretty much ended "flavor." As a consequence, bakers spent time working out how to "go back" to flavor, and began to popularize pre-ferments again. Cool video, and certainly explained why store bread pretty much sucks.
As for whether or not the loss of mass-produced "inexpensive" bread would lower store prices: No. Not a chance.
You can already see, here in 2024, the impact of inflation from printing worthless money and flooding it into the economy. Too many people chasing too few products, and the prices go up and up. We're just at the beginning of runaway inflation, so learning how to make your own bread is becoming critical. (Pan bread and a portable butane burner for when commercial power becomes a "luxury.")
Additionally, if you're what other people call a conspiracy theorist, organizations like the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Malthusians have been working tirelessly for nearly a hundred years to lower the population of the planet. They hold that we're running out of resources, so we have to entirely change the way we use agriculture to produce food. Oh, and kill off about 7.5-billion people, or sterilize them so they die out. They want a global population of about 500-million. Not billion: million.
Mass production will stay in place as long as there's energy. But the ingredients will change. Insect protein is a big one for these people, so we might find that store bread is still available, still somewhat affordable, but provides no nourishment at all for the human body. Great!
a miracle of food science too!
Yet it's a real pity that Wonder has become the epitome of bread.
For the sake of completeness it is interesting to see the replies to the original Guardian article
What I didn't like in the original article, apart from the inaccuracies, was the way it was trying to weave the arguments into so some kind of divisive culture-wars narrative. Good quality bread should not be a privilege. Everyone here knows that quality is not about the type of bread. One just has to see at the number of posts about super fluffy shokupan/Hokaido milk bread to see that it is not soft white bread that is the issue but the quality of what goes into a loaf.
I liked this answer in particular for its simplicity and straightforwardness and for busting all the culture-wars undertones of the original.
beautiful!
Making the bread quality a social justice issue is par for the course. Here in the US there's some idiotic editorial about how milk is a racial issue, if you can believe it.
People baked bread for thousands of years, and I'll bet it tasted a lot better than today's commercial bread -- that video discussed above. And sourdough bread was and still is a basic and fundamental bread. Even the yeast is free!
I think we should all understand that there's never been real Capitalism on a large scale. What we have now is Financial Capitalism. That's why bread tastes awful and costs way more than it should. It's more about the profit for the company than the quality of the bread.
Not long ago I was listening to a chef talk about a modified chili pepper that wasn't "hot" spicey. It was developed the old-fashioned way, like Luther Burbank did, by breeding generations.
He said that he's traveled all over the US (and some other countries), looking at how food is being developed and packaged for sale in commercial markets. Every single time he's asked anyone in that entire supply chain, "What about how it tastes?" they're all of them stunned!
NOBODY in the food industry seems to have any interest at all in the taste of what they're selling. And that, tells us all we need to know about why bread in the supermarket is junk. It's all about how it looks, shelf-life, production costs and marketing.
And you know what? Most people today would say that a typical meal they ate from 500 years ago tasted "terrible." They're so used to modern food and cooking, they no longer have any experience with the intensity of flavors in real organic food. Sad.