Cooking trend: the rise of real bread

A new movement is sweeping the nation. Up and down the land, rural communities are coming together to bake their daily bread: local loaves full of flavour and natural goodness

Remember the story of the Little Red Hen? "Who will help me cut this wheat?" she asks. "Who will help me grind the grain? Who will help me bake the bread?" "Not I," her farmyard companions reply one by one. So the piqued chicken eats the finished loaf all by herself - a poignant ending to a children's tale about the value of team spirit. But if the Little Red Hen were to arrive in Britain today she might find a more receptive audience. She would discover that an appetite for communal baking is slowly gathering strength in villages and neighbourhoods, where people are working together to make and sell good bread. In doing so they are not only supporting local producers and getting to know one another. They are also adding volume to the growing chorus of shoppers demanding a better, healthier version of our most basic staple food.

 

 

But first, the facts: Andrew Whitley, the pioneering founder of the Village Bakery in Cumbria calls it ‘real bread'. He coined the term in 2008 when he co-founded the Real Bread Campaign to raise awareness of the difference between natural slowly fermented bread and the depleted, additive-laden imitations. "Mass-produced bread favours shelf-life over nourishment - I have personally kept a supermarket loaf in its wrapping for three months before it went mouldy," Andrew says. "It's soft, cheap and tasteless, something to support your butter and marmalade. You can't force people to enjoy flavour, but you can point out the sacrifices that are being made."

 

 

In his award-winning 2006 book Bread Matters, Andrew lists the problems associated with the so-called ‘Chorleywood Bread Process', the fast, energy-intensive method that produces more than 80 per cent of UK bread. In order to produce a light, soft loaf with little or no fermentation, the dough is made with large quantities of yeast - which may exacerbate yeast intolerance - and an arsenal of emulsifiers, preservatives and improvers. More alarming are the enzymes, or ‘processing aids', which don't have to be declared on the label and which may cause allergies and come from genetically modified or animal sources. While properly fermented bread is pre-digested and easy on the stomach, non-fermented factory bread can cause bloating and stomach pain. "I've met hundreds of people who thought they couldn't eat bread, who can tolerate mine," Andrew says.

 

 

He believes in a gold standard -  bread made with wholemeal flour produced without chemical fertilizers and herbicides. The problems with bread stretch beyond the factory to the fields, where the raw material itself has become degraded. Modern high-yielding wheats, developed to suit the needs of industrial millers and bakers, have been shown to have around half the mineral content of older varieties. Roller-milling (which has largely replaced traditional stone-grinding) depletes the mineral content still further. "Nutritional quality doesn't get a look in," Andrew says. "No one seems to have asked whether flour was getting better or worse to eat, more or less nutritious, more or less digestible."

 

 

Andrew teaches people how to make slow-fermented loaves at his Bread Matters school, where he hosted the first Community-Supported Baking course last year. But there's more to his philosophy than the provision of nutritious food. "Making bread is a process of communal binding, a symbolic act that people understand at gut level. By supporting a community bakery you are buying into an idea of community cohesion."

 

 

Among the participants on that first course were Dan and Johanna McTiernan who had started thinking about bread when their son, Otso, was born. They wondered why the plastic bags containing their shop-bought loaves listed so many additives. Dan, a charity worker and keen cook, enrolled on an artisan baking course. Johanna, a camera operator who grew up in rural Finland, looked back to her childhood, when the whole family would gather beside her grandmother's wood-burning oven to bake rye sourdough loaves that had been fermenting for days. "We decided to combine our knowledge and start making our own bread," Johanna remembers. "It tasted better than anything we could buy." 

 

 

The couple gave away loaves to friends and neighbours in the West Yorkshire village of Marsden. Soon people wanted to buy it, so the McTiernans started a bread club. That evolved into The Handmade Bakery, a co-operative not-for-profit bakery that is now inspiring artisan bread enthusiasts all over Britain - delegates at a recent bread-lovers' conference had to be squeezed into the room when the couple did a workshop. The bakery is inspired by the principles of community-supported agriculture (CSA), a US model that encourages consumers to play a part in food production. "People ordered bread for one, three, six or 12 months in advance - they got a bigger discount the longer they signed up for - which gave us the capital to buy ingredients and equipment," Johanna explains.

 

 

When the Handmade Bakery launched a year ago the McTiernans couldn't afford their own kitchen. So they baked in the pizza oven at Mozzarella's restaurant in Marsden, during the mornings when it was closed and subscribers collected their loaves from the village whole-foods shop or microbrewery. "People started stopping for a pint when they picked up their bread," Dan says, delighted that the venture has encouraged social bonding. "We threw a party to thank our supporters: we provided the dough and people got together to make pizzas."

 

 

Thanks to a combination of grants and loans, the bakery now has its own premises - the back room of the Green Valley Grocer, a community-owned shop in the neighbouring village of Slaithwaite. It also has a third baker and co-director in Matt Betts, a sculptor who compares the skills of a craft baker to those of an artist working with clay. By mid-morning their tiny kitchen is steamy with the scents of semolina, sultana and fennel loaves, which are baking in the secondhand oven while the flagship Yorkshire leavens - made with stoneground organic flour from the North York Moors - cool on wire racks. "We didn't set out to make worthy bread," Dan says. "We wanted to make delicious bread that people would want to eat even if they knew nothing about the ethics."

 

 

It is a testament to the trio's baking skills that this is exactly what they have achieved. The Handmade Bakery produces more than 500 loaves a week. Around 50 subscribers commit to a minimum four loaves per month. The rest is sold through the Green Valley Grocer and other local shops. With the exception of the Yorkshire leaven - a white sourdough raised using the natural yeasts produced by a ‘starter' of fermented rye flour and water - their white, wholemeal and granary breads are made using the traditional sponge-and-dough method, in which a ‘sponge' of baker's yeast, flour and water is left to ripen overnight before being mixed with more flour and water to make the final dough. "When yeast was an expensive commodity, bakers used this technique to make a small amount go further," Johanna explains, adding that by the time her loaves go into the oven at 9am they've been fermenting for 16 to 20 hours. "Fermentation allows lactic and acetic acid to build up, which add flavour and act as preservatives. We don't need to add anything artificial to our bread."

 

 

Neither does John Letts, an archaeological botanist who scoured the world's seed banks for heritage varieties of wheat and planted them in fields around Oxford and Reading. The resulting crop produced such good-quality milling flour that he co-founded a community-supported baking scheme - the Oxford Bread Group - to enable him to produce and sell a truly local loaf. He hopes to open a bakery and stone mill as part of a new community centre this spring. This vision of communal benefit is at the core of the fledgling community baking movement. At the Handmade Bakery in Slaithwaite, Dan and Johanna McTiernan don't just want to sell great bread, they want to teach others how to make it, too. In Dartmouth, Holly and David Jones of the cookery school Manna from Devon invite volunteers to join in monthly community bread-box baking sessions. On Whitmuir Farm near Edinburgh, where Pete Ritchie plans to open a bakery funded by a bread bond - investors will be paid interest in bread, not money - the ovens are to be made available to local people wishing to bake their own loaves. And in Dunbar, East Lothian, a community group has raised £51,000 through a share issue to pay for a high-street bakery that will provide employment and training opportunities.

 

 

Ultimately, community baking is about empowering people to seize back control of their daily bread, whether that means buying it from a known and trusted source or using good quality flour and baking it themselves. "Baking bread makes you feel good," Johanna McTiernan observes. The Little Red Hen would surely agree that baking together feels even better.

 

 

Click here to find out where you can buy real bread and flour

 

 

Download inspiring bread recipes by clicking here. And send us your own recipes - we'll be featuring the best ‘Reader's Loaf' recipe each month in Country Living magazine. For the chance to have your loaf featured, send a digital photograph of you and your loaf, with the recipe (state original source), your name and contact details to food@countryliving.co.uk. If your loaf is chosen, you will win an Allinson flour and baking kit (for recipes and tips, visit www.bakingmad.com).

 

 

 

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