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.