I'm sure this was a very interesting article but after 7 paragraphs telling me that bread had changed in this one weird way, but not yet telling me how, it started feeling like marketing and I couldn't read more.
I guess I'll never find out why the bread in Europe also has holes.
I resorted to getting chatgpt to make a summary... Which I am loathe to do:
"Chorleywood replaced long fermentation with intensive mechanical mixing, allowing Britain to turn its previously unsuitable low-protein wheat into cheap mass-produced white bread and substantially reduce its reliance on imported Canadian grain."
Does anyone know if the technique mentioned by the earlier Aerated Bread Company still exist today? Like can you buy a bread somewhere made with the technology. No yeast but using carbon dioxide? Sounds like the irish soda bread, so not fermentation by yeast but chemical leavening. But surely they are different because the irish soda bread is dense whereas the Aerated bread sounds like something more fluffy. Googling around I couldn't find a photo how did this bread look like.
> The Chorleywood bread process allows the use of lower-protein wheats and reduces processing time,[5] the system being able to produce a loaf of bread from flour to sliced and packaged form in about three and a half hours. This is achieved through the addition of vitamin C, fat, yeast, and intense mechanical working by high-speed mixers, not feasible in a small-scale kitchen.
> The process significantly reduced fermentation time and allowed greater use of non-imported wheat, which helped reduce the price of bread.[4] According to a representative of the British Federation of Bakers, "UK bread is around the cheapest in the world."[5]
As of 2011, 80% of bread made in the United Kingdom used the process, which has also spread to other countries such as Australia, South Africa, South America, Turkey and France.
This article makes it sound like a good thing, but bread made using the Chorleywood process is considered as ultra-processed food and studies shows that it can contribute to IBS.
IMO This invention has been bad for the UK, causing real bread to become an expensive, and hard to find in some places, specialty.
Brits will pop up like snails in the rain to defend this god awful bread. They'll explain to you for the 15th time that it was a necessity back in the day, or how it's cheaper or faster to make or whatever reason they come up with in the moment. Fellow Brits, we know this, it's ok, it's 2026 the ration times are over. It's time to move on or accept reality.
The reality is that the process is used all round the world these days (as covered in the article), not just in Britain, and its done that by being fast and cheap. It's also doubtful that it's any worse for you than American supermarket breads which are pumped full of sugar, emulsified oils etc etc.
Frankly all the pre-processed, plastic-wrapped supermarket loaves can get in the bin as far as I'm concerned, I buy sourdough from the local farmers market. But that's significantly more expensive and I recognise it's a position of privilege.
Harsh but true. It's the same phenomenon as defending the BS 1363 power plug that needed an embedded fuse because their domestic postwar electrical wiring was Not Great -- to save on copper.
I cannot really think of worse bread than pret or that first picture garbage. It's just so horrible compared what I bake at home, but sure, you can keep it for 40 years and it'll still be the same. Apparently people value that over their colon health.
At the time, it was, it allowed the country to feed itself on (largely) its own wheat. They didn't know it could contribute to IBS, they did know there was national food security at stake. Beyond that it made cheaper, mass-produced bread more viable in a bunch of places. Historically, globally it's hard to see cheaper staple food as an entirely bad thing. Now we know the consequences perhaps it's time to rethink.
> causing real bread to become an expensive, and hard to find in some places, specialty.
How do you think it has it caused real bread to become expensive? Is it not more likely that real bread is more expensive to produce and therefore people buy the cheap shit?
Great article, but it's not telling the whole story.
Since the Chorleywood Bread Process, British agriculture - selective breeding - has bred strains of wheat which reach high protein levels in the British environment. So the Chorleywood process these days is about using the less-good British wheat for cheap supermarket bread.
"Strong" flour that you can buy in shops is now mostly British as well.
>> You realise the extent to which the world around is sometime quite precariously perched on these supply chains.
As s child, I lived in a world where there were no supply chains, no marketing and no advertising. Profit-based business was seen a mean thing to do.
City living and desire for goods from far away lands - created supply chains which dictate how people should live, in a precariously dependent way such that they can't make their needed things on their own and they can't have them made them locally. What a progress.
Unless you lived thousands of years ago, there was a supply chain. For bread there was a farmer, a miller, and a baker. That's a supply chain. And they were even more profit hungry back then, adulterating the flour with fillers to save money.
I've got a few pet peeves about bread and American food service. Bread is spongy, and it's designed to sop up liquids and sauces. But when you're served bread in a restaurant, or incorporate a recipe at home, there is seldom time enough, or sauce enough, to soak sufficiently into the bread.
If you get a burger on a thick brioche bun, or a sub sandwich, and the kitchen has just five minutes ago dabbed on mayo, mustard, and ketchup, there are still inches of bread to chew through. Or a dinner roll from a basket, piping hot, and the customer puts on butter, moments before eating. The bun becomes an obstacle, rather than a vehicle for the ingredients.
It's understandable that the industry has cut back on the amount of condiments or fats that are applied to bread, but if I finish a plate of pasta and there is no sauce left, what good is that slice of garlic bread? If there is a menu choice, I often opt for flatbread, or tortillas, and I feel better that way.
I'm starting to suspect that this has increased widespread aversion to eating bread, and perhaps some percentage of gluten intolerance is sponge intolerance: people are tired of chewing dry bread, and the bread is not perceived as a key nutritional part of the meal, and it can no longer serve a purpose in sopping up juice and sauces, so we've constructed a plausible reason to demand alternatives.
> More to the point, the ciabatta depends for its production on modern breadmaking techniques, chief among them high-hydration doughs. And in order to pull off high hydration doughs you need “strong” modern flours with very high gluten and protein levels. And for the most part, even in Italy, those flours have to be imported.
I think this is a bit overstating the change: 11% protein (they don't indicate a W factor but it's pretty low) is what I have in my pantry and you can absolutely bake ciabattas with it.
Yes, but when done in industrial (or store) setting they use processes that go faster than what you use at home. Those processes needs the extra protein.
All I want to know is why are Parisian baguettes so good? From this article I get that they are a low-gluten bread. But can that be all? I've always suspected a secret variety of wheat.
In all my life and travels I've never had bread nearly as good as the French baguette and I've always wondered why.
French bread is just normal bread, while most other places seem to use the Chorleywood process now, which produces something different.
You can find bread as good as French bread in other places, like some Belgian bakeries but definitely not all of them, or in Vietnam and much of North Africa.
It's really just that much of the Western world seems to have moved to the Chorleywood process because it's cheaper while France has laws to prevent it.
You can buy non-chorleywood bread from bakers and from most supermarkets in the UK (look for their 'sourdough' loaves, some might even give a fermentation time)
But French bread is still particularly good somehow, there is just nothing like a fresh baguette from a baker in a small village in rural France.
So there's something else going on there IMHO. Specifically with baguettes.
(I wish I could find a good baguette here in Western Australia, most of them are utter trash. As are most of the croissants, though I was able to find a specialist baker for those so not all is lost...)
I don't think that's the only reason. Here in Germany, you can also buy that fluffy white bread—usually wrapped in plastic—that's probably made that way. But most bread in Germany is still produced the traditional way, especially since it's often not pure wheat bread but rather rye bread or mixed-grain bread. Still, a real French baguette is unbeatable. Maybe it's the quality of the flour. But I'm sure it's mainly the very long resting time before baking. In my experience, that's also what makes pizza dough especially soft and flavorful.
Long fermentation with little sourdough is making a come back in France (e.g the Respectus Panis thing) but I would think it's harder to apply to baguettes for professional bakers looking at how many they churn a day. That would be a lot of proofing bread to store.
For some reason I read this in James Burke's voice and I could swear I was teleported back to the 80's watching a hitherto unseen episode of Connections.
I was hoping this would be about a new way to augur the events of the day from my morning toast to ensemble with the tea leaves at the bottom of my morning cuppa, alas ...
I read about the Chorleywood Bread Process in a book out of the library at a time when I was making a bunch of bread: it was the year 1993.
I was quite appalled by what I learned.
The basic idea is that we introduce air into the dough mechanically, which reduces how much time the yeast has to do. It's worked down to the energy: you have to put in so many kWh or joules of work into so many kilograms of dough to get a certain result.
This process is what gives rise (ha ha) to that spongy, tasteless, highly compressible substance that is not recognizable as bread if you're from the other side of the Channel.
The whole idea is to make the largest-looking bread possible using the smallest amount of solid material, in the least amount of time: i.e. not my bread values.
I'm sure this was a very interesting article but after 7 paragraphs telling me that bread had changed in this one weird way, but not yet telling me how, it started feeling like marketing and I couldn't read more.
I guess I'll never find out why the bread in Europe also has holes.
I agree, what a chore to read.
I resorted to getting chatgpt to make a summary... Which I am loathe to do:
"Chorleywood replaced long fermentation with intensive mechanical mixing, allowing Britain to turn its previously unsuitable low-protein wheat into cheap mass-produced white bread and substantially reduce its reliance on imported Canadian grain."
Alas, Chorleywood tastes awful. At least to German taste buds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process is a more focused article about it.
Reading through this page...
Does anyone know if the technique mentioned by the earlier Aerated Bread Company still exist today? Like can you buy a bread somewhere made with the technology. No yeast but using carbon dioxide? Sounds like the irish soda bread, so not fermentation by yeast but chemical leavening. But surely they are different because the irish soda bread is dense whereas the Aerated bread sounds like something more fluffy. Googling around I couldn't find a photo how did this bread look like.
That was interesting. Highlights for me:
> The Chorleywood bread process allows the use of lower-protein wheats and reduces processing time,[5] the system being able to produce a loaf of bread from flour to sliced and packaged form in about three and a half hours. This is achieved through the addition of vitamin C, fat, yeast, and intense mechanical working by high-speed mixers, not feasible in a small-scale kitchen.
> The process significantly reduced fermentation time and allowed greater use of non-imported wheat, which helped reduce the price of bread.[4] According to a representative of the British Federation of Bakers, "UK bread is around the cheapest in the world."[5]
As of 2011, 80% of bread made in the United Kingdom used the process, which has also spread to other countries such as Australia, South Africa, South America, Turkey and France.
I at least appreciate he was up front about advertising his book.
But, yes, after about seven paragraphs I could no longer read on, and I had completely lost any interest in his book.
This should be given as an example how marketing can actively damage your product.
I can't believe how high this is on hackernews. It feels odd.
I lost interest too. I could grow grain grind it, and make bread before I finished the article.
Absolutely. I will never waste my time with slop that doesn't get to the point. This is a lousy blog post about bread, not a great novel.
Indeed, what an arduous read.
YouTube is infested with lede burying as well. I hate it.
This is the kind of writing that I assume the people who read the NYT or Atlantic enjoy.
The content is good but yes it's like there is a different class of people that really want to FEEL like they are reading. They are doing THE WORK.
This article makes it sound like a good thing, but bread made using the Chorleywood process is considered as ultra-processed food and studies shows that it can contribute to IBS. IMO This invention has been bad for the UK, causing real bread to become an expensive, and hard to find in some places, specialty.
Brits will pop up like snails in the rain to defend this god awful bread. They'll explain to you for the 15th time that it was a necessity back in the day, or how it's cheaper or faster to make or whatever reason they come up with in the moment. Fellow Brits, we know this, it's ok, it's 2026 the ration times are over. It's time to move on or accept reality.
The reality is that the process is used all round the world these days (as covered in the article), not just in Britain, and its done that by being fast and cheap. It's also doubtful that it's any worse for you than American supermarket breads which are pumped full of sugar, emulsified oils etc etc.
Frankly all the pre-processed, plastic-wrapped supermarket loaves can get in the bin as far as I'm concerned, I buy sourdough from the local farmers market. But that's significantly more expensive and I recognise it's a position of privilege.
Harsh but true. It's the same phenomenon as defending the BS 1363 power plug that needed an embedded fuse because their domestic postwar electrical wiring was Not Great -- to save on copper.
But we all do this with our own stanky poop.
The plug ain't too bad actually. (And I grew up with European style plugs.)
Still a vastly better mechanical design than what they make you use in the US: they barely hold in the socket.
I cannot really think of worse bread than pret or that first picture garbage. It's just so horrible compared what I bake at home, but sure, you can keep it for 40 years and it'll still be the same. Apparently people value that over their colon health.
yes, long fermentation reduces fodmaps in breads which in turn makes it better digestable (plus it just takes better).
> This article makes it sound like a good thing
At the time, it was, it allowed the country to feed itself on (largely) its own wheat. They didn't know it could contribute to IBS, they did know there was national food security at stake. Beyond that it made cheaper, mass-produced bread more viable in a bunch of places. Historically, globally it's hard to see cheaper staple food as an entirely bad thing. Now we know the consequences perhaps it's time to rethink.
> causing real bread to become an expensive, and hard to find in some places, specialty.
How do you think it has it caused real bread to become expensive? Is it not more likely that real bread is more expensive to produce and therefore people buy the cheap shit?
Great article, but it's not telling the whole story.
Since the Chorleywood Bread Process, British agriculture - selective breeding - has bred strains of wheat which reach high protein levels in the British environment. So the Chorleywood process these days is about using the less-good British wheat for cheap supermarket bread.
"Strong" flour that you can buy in shops is now mostly British as well.
>> You realise the extent to which the world around is sometime quite precariously perched on these supply chains.
As s child, I lived in a world where there were no supply chains, no marketing and no advertising. Profit-based business was seen a mean thing to do.
City living and desire for goods from far away lands - created supply chains which dictate how people should live, in a precariously dependent way such that they can't make their needed things on their own and they can't have them made them locally. What a progress.
Unless you lived thousands of years ago, there was a supply chain. For bread there was a farmer, a miller, and a baker. That's a supply chain. And they were even more profit hungry back then, adulterating the flour with fillers to save money.
Are you being sarcastic?
I've got a few pet peeves about bread and American food service. Bread is spongy, and it's designed to sop up liquids and sauces. But when you're served bread in a restaurant, or incorporate a recipe at home, there is seldom time enough, or sauce enough, to soak sufficiently into the bread.
If you get a burger on a thick brioche bun, or a sub sandwich, and the kitchen has just five minutes ago dabbed on mayo, mustard, and ketchup, there are still inches of bread to chew through. Or a dinner roll from a basket, piping hot, and the customer puts on butter, moments before eating. The bun becomes an obstacle, rather than a vehicle for the ingredients.
It's understandable that the industry has cut back on the amount of condiments or fats that are applied to bread, but if I finish a plate of pasta and there is no sauce left, what good is that slice of garlic bread? If there is a menu choice, I often opt for flatbread, or tortillas, and I feel better that way.
I'm starting to suspect that this has increased widespread aversion to eating bread, and perhaps some percentage of gluten intolerance is sponge intolerance: people are tired of chewing dry bread, and the bread is not perceived as a key nutritional part of the meal, and it can no longer serve a purpose in sopping up juice and sauces, so we've constructed a plausible reason to demand alternatives.
> More to the point, the ciabatta depends for its production on modern breadmaking techniques, chief among them high-hydration doughs. And in order to pull off high hydration doughs you need “strong” modern flours with very high gluten and protein levels. And for the most part, even in Italy, those flours have to be imported.
I think this is a bit overstating the change: 11% protein (they don't indicate a W factor but it's pretty low) is what I have in my pantry and you can absolutely bake ciabattas with it.
Yes, but when done in industrial (or store) setting they use processes that go faster than what you use at home. Those processes needs the extra protein.
All I want to know is why are Parisian baguettes so good? From this article I get that they are a low-gluten bread. But can that be all? I've always suspected a secret variety of wheat.
In all my life and travels I've never had bread nearly as good as the French baguette and I've always wondered why.
French bread is just normal bread, while most other places seem to use the Chorleywood process now, which produces something different.
You can find bread as good as French bread in other places, like some Belgian bakeries but definitely not all of them, or in Vietnam and much of North Africa.
It's really just that much of the Western world seems to have moved to the Chorleywood process because it's cheaper while France has laws to prevent it.
You can buy non-chorleywood bread from bakers and from most supermarkets in the UK (look for their 'sourdough' loaves, some might even give a fermentation time)
But French bread is still particularly good somehow, there is just nothing like a fresh baguette from a baker in a small village in rural France.
So there's something else going on there IMHO. Specifically with baguettes.
(I wish I could find a good baguette here in Western Australia, most of them are utter trash. As are most of the croissants, though I was able to find a specialist baker for those so not all is lost...)
I don't think that's the only reason. Here in Germany, you can also buy that fluffy white bread—usually wrapped in plastic—that's probably made that way. But most bread in Germany is still produced the traditional way, especially since it's often not pure wheat bread but rather rye bread or mixed-grain bread. Still, a real French baguette is unbeatable. Maybe it's the quality of the flour. But I'm sure it's mainly the very long resting time before baking. In my experience, that's also what makes pizza dough especially soft and flavorful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0U8RdRdFDU
do this. thank me later. (yes, it takes multiple days!). as good as when we hop over to France.
I don’t know how common it is in France, but you can ferment a baguette for 3 days and it makes a big difference.
Long fermentation with little sourdough is making a come back in France (e.g the Respectus Panis thing) but I would think it's harder to apply to baguettes for professional bakers looking at how many they churn a day. That would be a lot of proofing bread to store.
For some reason I read this in James Burke's voice and I could swear I was teleported back to the 80's watching a hitherto unseen episode of Connections.
Interesting stuff.
I was hoping this would be about a new way to augur the events of the day from my morning toast to ensemble with the tea leaves at the bottom of my morning cuppa, alas ...
I read about the Chorleywood Bread Process in a book out of the library at a time when I was making a bunch of bread: it was the year 1993.
I was quite appalled by what I learned.
The basic idea is that we introduce air into the dough mechanically, which reduces how much time the yeast has to do. It's worked down to the energy: you have to put in so many kWh or joules of work into so many kilograms of dough to get a certain result.
This process is what gives rise (ha ha) to that spongy, tasteless, highly compressible substance that is not recognizable as bread if you're from the other side of the Channel.
The whole idea is to make the largest-looking bread possible using the smallest amount of solid material, in the least amount of time: i.e. not my bread values.
> The whole idea is to make the largest-looking bread possible using the smallest amount of solid material, in the least amount of time
Good old post-WW2 poverty thinking that never went away because profit