Tasting notes

The best thing in sliced bread

‘SLICED BREAD IS TOAST.’ ‘Traditional sliced-bread makers in crisis.’ ‘Gluten-free fad takes a big slice out of bread sales.’ The headlines (and puns) haven’t changed much over the past few years. In May, analysts reported that the value of wrapped sliced bread sold in the UK dropped by 3.7 per cent in 2016. Warburtons, Hovis and Kingsmill all experienced struggling sales (with Warburtons’ down £57.6 million on the year before), and it had been a similar story in 2015. The root cause seemed clear: we’re all cutting down on carbs; many of us have adopted a gluten-free diet; and if wraps and salads are in then packets of sliced loaves are definitely out.

So it was a bold move for baker Rich- ard Bertinet to launch a range of exactly those in Waitrose last year. I first met him almost a decade ago at his baking school in Bath, where he asked his wannabe focaccia makers to squeeze fistfuls of cheap sliced white. ‘Smell it,’ he commanded. ‘It smells of vinegar.’ Such loaves, produced rapidly and with additives by the high-yield Chorleywood process, were best avoided, said Bertinet, but he acknowledged that parents still needed to knock up sandwiches or ram something in the toaster at speed. ‘Sliced bread remains the answer,’ he told me recently, ‘it just needs to be a better option. People don’t hate sliced bread, they hate what’s in it.’ The Bertinet Bakery’s version is a three-ingredient sourdough, made in a tin for a tighter crumb. New varieties include olive, seeded, and cheesy onion and cumin. If anything can make consumers turn back to a slice of white, it’s this. From £1.95 at Waitrose

Baker Richard Bertinet at work in the kitchen