Knead to know
Bread, on the surface, seems impossibly simple. At its most fundamental, it is simply flour (milled wheat grain) and water.
Most loaves have small additions of oil, salt and yeast, to help the dough rise and give it shape. But essentially, that’s it. You mix the dough, knead it to bind the protein in the flour (gluten) and give the bread structure, let it rise and then bake it.
The modern supermarket loaf is a different story. Two large baking companies make almost all the bread in
New Zealand supermarkets.
Goodman Fielder, which makes Nature’s Fresh, Vogel’s, Molenberg, Mackenzie and
Freya’s, is owned by Singaporeanbased company Wilmar International and Hong Kongbased fund First Pacific.
George Weston, which makes Tip Top, Ploughmans, and Burgen, is owned by Uk-based Associated British Foods.
Ralph Thorogood, chair of the Baking Industry Research Trust, which represents both big companies, argues that in principle commercial bakers don’t do anything different to what an artisan baker does.
‘‘Weighing up our ingredients, we mix them together in a largescale mixer the same as the craft bakery does.
‘‘We take that dough and divide it into individual pieces. The craft baker does it by hand on a divider.’’
Sam Ellis, founder of Christchurch artisan bakery Grizzly, which makes bagels and breads, disagrees strongly.
‘‘It’s so bizarre, [mass-produced bread] has no flavour. You know when you toast a piece of that bread and you try to butter it and the whole thing caves in, it has no integrity in the product and that’s kind of the whole thing.’’
Ellis specialises in sourdough bread that takes 12 hours to make, compared to what he says are the two or three hours to make supermarket bread.
The bread in supermarkets ranges from the basic $1 loaf to heavily branded designer loaves that can cost more than $5. Enter the gluten-free section and you’re past the $8 mark. Ellis’ Grizzly loaves retail for $7.50.
Excluding glutenfree, all the massproduced wheat loaves on sale in supermarkets and dairies are made, on Thorogood’s admission, from essentially the same flour – as in the white, refined stuff.
To understand this, it’s important to know the difference between wholemeal flour and white flour.
Luca Serventi, a professor of agriculture and life sciences at Lincoln University, says wholemeal flour includes all parts of the wheat kernel – the bran (the outer fibre-rich layer), the germ (a nutritious embryo) and the endosperm (a starchy tissue).
White flour, also known as wheat flour or refined flour, is made just from the endosperm, and hence is almost entirely starch.
Serventi says there is no question that bread made from wholemeal flour is better for you.
‘‘We’re going to have more fibre but also more minerals, especially iron. To give an idea, white bread has virtually no iron, while wholegrain bread can contribute up to 5-10 per cent of our recommended daily intake.’’
But here’s the catch. Despite the appearance of wholemeal flour at the higher-end of the bread section in the supermarket, almost all of the bread in the aisle is made from white flour, with other stuff added in later.
Lower-end wheatmeal bread in the supermarket, for example, can be simply white bread with the wheat husk thrown back in afterwards.
Serventi says the more basic wheatmeal bread could be marginally better than white bread because of this, but its health benefits are dubious.
‘‘That gives you the same fibre content, but you might be losing some of the vitamins and the minerals in the process of separating the bread.’’
‘‘It’s so bizarre, [mass-produced bread] has no flavour.’’ Sam Ellis Founder of Christchurch artisan bakery Grizzly
None of the supermarket brands Stuff examined used just wholemeal flour. One of the key ingredient words used by many breads is ‘‘wheat flour’’, which Serventi says is just another name for white flour.
More expensive brands such as Vogel’s, Burgen, Freya’s and Ploughmans hint in their ingredient list that wholemeal is there by using terminology such as ‘‘wholemeal wheat flour’’, ‘‘wheat flour (white, wholemeal)’’ or the more perplexing ‘‘wholegrain wholemeal wheat flour’’.
But Serventi says we don’t know how much wholemeal is added
because the bread companies don’t have to say. It could be just a token amount.
The more expensive breads do, however, make up for the lack of protein, fibre and minerals in refined flour with added seeds, bran and grains, which Serventi says are definitely good for you. Ironically, though, these loaves may need more additives than plain bread to keep the structure intact.
‘‘Once you add the seeds they’re heavy, plus they contain fibre so they will make your loaf kind of collapse because the dough is very, very light; almost half the dough is air.’’
These additives can be expensive and, along with the seeds, grains and marketing, help explain the cost.
One of the biggest differences between homemade bread and
commercial bread is how the stuff is actually made, and specifically the use of what’s known as the Chorleywood process, which dramatically reduces the breadmaking time thanks to the use of high-speed mixing, along with additives like emulsifiers and enzymes.
While Ralph Thorogood reasons that the sped-up breadmaking process is necessary to meet the public’s demand for bread, artisan baker Sam Ellis reckons that all the additives simply reflect the abandonment of traditional ways.
‘‘If you think about it, this is a symptom of so much of modern society. We’ve accidentally created a problem and we try to retroactively fix it by treating these symptoms, rather than preventing them from happening in the first place.’’