Use Your Loaf!

Organic, stoneground wholewheat flour (from Shipton Mill), water, salt and yeast. No fat, no flour treatment agent: L-ascorbic acid (E300), no bleach, no reducing agent: L-cysteine hydrochloride, no soya flour, no emulsifiers: Diacetylated tartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, Sodium steoryl-2-lactylate, Glycerol mono-stearate or Lecithins, no preservatives: Calcium propionate or vinegar, no enzymes: Alpha-amylase, Maltogenic amylase, Oxidase, Protease, Peptidase, Lipase, Phospholipase, Hemicellulase, Xylanase, Transglutaminase. No printed plastic packaging to dispose of. Grass roots activism in a simple loaf. A call to Bakers' arms.

I followed the Basic Bread recipe in Andrew Whitley's inspirational book bread matters The state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own. Admittedly as a first-off, the crust is a little overdone and it would have been more satisfying if I'd baked one large loaf, instead of two small, for a better proportion of crumb to crust. But hey I am chuffed and have put aside a lump of the dough to bake Whitley's Bread with Old Dough recipe. I can't wait.

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The Real Bread Campaign

Nothing is closer to our hearts than the salty, saccharin, fizzy, marshmallow soft, rainbow-hued memories of food that map our life experiences when viewed through the skewed kaleidoscopic, synergistic interactions of a cocktail of non-nutritional food additives: preservatives, colourings, flavourings, thickeners, emulsifiers and stabilisers, our generations, X and Y, have been inadvertently ingesting for several decades (not to mention our dose quotidienne of dishwashing liquid and toothpaste residue).

Under parental guidance, we have been brought up inured, our indifference possibly symptomatic of the neurotoxic effects of our formative diets, to off-the-shelf, pre-prepared, convenience ingredients, just-add-water-ready mixes and quick frozen meals. "Can't cook", we enthusiastically relinquish our own skills as means to culinary sufficiency and pride ourselves in exercising our uninformed consumer choice "don't cook!".

Here in the UK there is a current TV advertising campaign announcing that "Blue (Smartie) is back". If like me you immediately rushed out in a fit of nostalgia and bought a box of this crunchy, sugar-coated, chocolate confectionery only to discover that the colour of ALL Smarties is now disappointingly wishy washy (!!!) one is forced to acknowledge the creeping suspicion as to why is it that food industry giants are now removing additives in products aimed at children in a bid, as they claim, to improve their "nutritional quality"? If these additives are non-nutritional then one can extrapolate that the only reason they are doing this is in fact to reduce the toxicity of their products. Is it just possible that those kids who started frothing at the mouth, threw themselves on the floor and gnashed at people's ankles at the mere sight of additive inoculated food were not just simply more badly behaved than we were?

Since it is still considered okay for these additives to be in food aimed at adults, it is time we big kids make our own unadulterated food using ingredients of integrity. No need to to write to your local MP or quit eating altogether in protest, simply baking your own bread is grass roots activism at its most nutritious and delicious. Spend your money judiciously (food manufacturers and retailers, for all they call themselves market leaders, will bend themselves over backwards to meet customer demand) and tuck into some top nosh you made yourself with your own two hands.

I baked the white bread wheat sheaf loaf as part of The Hornbeam Centre's "Rise Up: A celebration of bread" Lammas celebration. As part of the day's events there was a truly inspirational talk by Andrew Whitley, an organic baker, who explained, as a cause of the disingenuous practices employed in the industrial manufacture of bread and the farming of wheat for bread flour production, why he had initiated The Real Bread Campaign. It is not every day that one has the opportunity to experience an eureka moment - I came away from his talk vowing to start eating real bread on a regular basis and to take the time to teach myself how to bake it. Watch this space.

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