Order of the Bath

Bread is not what it used to be; or, more particularly, supermarket bread is not the same as was made in the village bakery. This is the claim of many whole-food and healthy living advocates. The common test quoted is to squeeze a small piece of bread between the fingers. factory bread will squash into a glutinous ball and “real” bread will crumble.

I can remember when I was young that it was “steam baking” that was blamed. The implication was that the steam got into the bread and made it soggy. This is rubbish of course. Steam ovens were as dry as any other sort, they just used super-heated steam in pipes to heat them. There would undoubtedly be a difference from an open flame gas oven but not from electric heating.

More recently the Chorleywood manufacturing process (PDF) is blamed. This was invented in 1961 and was rapidly adopted by all large scale manufacturers as it dramatically reduces the production time. Yet an academic report in 1966 (Chamberlain, et. al. PDF) concluded that there was very little nutritional difference in results from previous methods, thought it should be noted that it was comparing against a previous industrial process.

So what goes into bread? The basic ingredients are flour, mostly wheat (100 units), water (55-60 units by weight), yeast (1-2 units) and salt (1-2 units). This doesn’t vary much whether made industrially or domestically. There may be small amounts of other ingredients, fat/oil (1 unit) is used to soften the bread. Acetic acid (vinegar) can be used as a preservative. Commercial bread also includes some proprietary additives which include fungicides (to stop mould) and emulsifiers.

Some additives are out of the control of the bread makers—flour has to contain certain minerals and vitamins by law and these have to be boosted with flour improvers if not naturally present, which is always the case except for wholemeal flour. This is also true for flour bought for home baking, whatever the source.

So what difference does the Chorleywood process make. It uses about double the yeast because it has to act faster. It uses hard (hydrogenated or fractionated) fat which is high in chloresterol and a very small amount of Ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) is added to aid the release of gluten. The speed of the process may also retain a higher moisture content before baking but it won’t be huge. I suspect that any other differences when compared to artisan bread are more down to the quality of the flour and industrialisation rather than the process.

Whilst buying a mattress yesterday, we were chatting to the assistant and realised how many of the old independent department stores had vanished from Bristol since we have been here. These are the ones that I can remember…

• Jolly’s on Whiteladies Road—I don’t remember using this one much and it closed soon after we came here. Part of the premises is now occupied by Maskreys furniture shop.
• Taylors on Queens Road—A smaller one. I think it was taken over by Debenhams who soon closed it. Habitat who were on the Triangle moved here and it is still going.
• Maggs on Queens Road—This one was a little down market and we used it a lot. Members of the family used to be prominent on the city council but it virtually closed in the late ’70s just leaving a basement hardware store and then even that went. Now there are a row of separate shops.
• Next door was Brights, the posh neighbour—We used this one quite a bit as well and there was a hotel behind, run by the same family, which parents used when coming up for graduation. It closed or was taken over (I am not sure which) by Dingles, a branch of House of Fraser. They did an huge refit, gutting the insides and rebuilding. There was a terrific fuss when they changed the frontage and added funny little cupola arches. Later they dropped the independent name and finally moved out. Now there is a branch of Borders and some smaller shops on the ground floor but I have no idea what is in the extensive space above.
• Lewis’s on the Horsefair—they had their own bank in the shop which, by the time we knew it, was a subsidiary of Lloyds but retained it’s identity. This was a true city centre department store over 6 floors with a restaurant on the mezzanine. It was taken over/replaced by John Lewis, no previous connection but confusing, before they moved out of town to Cribbs Causeway. Then it was empty for a bit before being taken on by Bentalls of Reading for a short while until House of Fraser moved from Queens Road. Recently they moved on to the brand new Cabot Circus so now it is empty again.
• Next door was and still there is the national chain store, Debenhams.

So now there is only Gardiner Haskins, which is connected to Gardiners of Cirencester and Haskins of Shepton Mallet. It is a sprawling ramshackle place off the beaten track behind Old Market. It always looks like it can’t survive the year out but somehow keeps going. It is staffed by the old school assistants who are also ramshackle and off the track just like Grace Brothers and you keep expecting John Inman to pop up behind a sofa and say “Are you being served, sir?

If

then why isn’t

?

Thanks to a comment on Lifehacker for the idea.

This came from the BBC but pointed out to me by Fred Langa.

I could just leave it there but those not speaking Welsh would never get the joke. What the second part actually says is…

I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.

It is not the parts of the Bible that I understand that trouble me, it is the parts that I don’t understand.

Mark Twain, paraphrased from memory.

Earth and Heaven will pass away, but the Word of God is eternal.

Apparently written on the last standing wall of the headquarters of the Bible Society in Warsaw, one of the few remaining parts of the central city still standing after it was razed in the second world war.

There are a lot of ways to write telephone numbers, plenty of “standards” to chose from so why do so many people get them wrong?

For national numbers the only essential requirement is a space between the local part and the area code: that is 0117 9123456 (NOT 01179) for Bristol and 020 84641234 (NOT 0208) for London. Parentheses, hyphens and extra spaces can be put in for readability and local custom but it is not essential. A typical US number would be written (918) 555 1212.

On the web, it is often better to use international numbers. These should be written with a plus at the start, a space between the country code and the area code and another before the local part: i.e. +44 117 9123456. The ITU-T E.123 standard recommends that only spaces are used for extra separation. A typical French number (in Strasbourg) would be +33 388 12 34 56.

Canal boat chase ends in capture after eight days. I am not 100% sure that this story is genuine, but it is very funny anyway. The gist is that they applied for permission to exceed the 4mph speed limit but found that the boat wouldn’t go any faster anyway—something I can confirm from experience, it is the depth of water that is the problem.

I’m sure everyone if familiar with the knobbly pavements put in so the blind can tell where the crossings are. Have you noticed that they are pink near lights controlled crossings and yellow elsewhere?

Why? I have conducted a blind test (boom! boom!) and he can’t tell the difference. The bumps are the same size, spacing and direction. Yet the official guidelines do specify that this is what has to be done.

Tactile paving, in the form of ‘blister’ paving should be red in colour at controlled pedestrian crossings (pelican, zebra, toucan and puffin crossings). But at uncontrolled crossings it should be buff in colour, to indicate the presence of a dropped kerb.

Access Group Resources

Even the partially sighted, who also benefit from these markings, would have trouble distinguishing the pale colours.

Do you suppose there is another Anglican church that commemorates a Wesley in a stained glass window? I have never seen one. Admittedly it is Charles not John but still pretty amazing.

It forms part of a set of four in our church (St. Matthew’s, Kingsdown, Bristol) with John Bunyon, William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer. These were installed, we think, in the middle of the last century.

One of our super-bosses today, used the phrase “because diamonds last forever…” Is this true? I don’t think so. Diamond is said to be the hardest known substance naturally occurring, but that doesn’t mean that it is indestructible. They will shatter if treated roughly because they are brittle. They will also burn (with some difficulty) and dissolve in some substances. For this reason I suspect that they do also naturally decay by oxidation but very slowly due to the tight molecular bonds.

It is also to be noted that diamond is not the rareest or most expensive of the gem stones. Good sapphires, emeralds, garnets and rubies are much less common and fetch higher prices; particularly now that sythetic diamonds are getting to be so good.