The Little Holes in Your Bread Reveal a Postwar Industrial Revolution
The little holes in your bread are telling you something
In his new book Trade World, Edmund Conway reveals that the tiny cells in British sliced white bread are the signature of the Chorleywood Bread Process. Invented in 1961, this method replaced long fermentation with intense mechanical mixing, allowing British wheat to replace most imported Canadian wheat. It became a global export, with India and Shanghai using Chorleywood while North America and Singapore rely on the American sponge-and-dough system.
If you go into any supermarket in the world and pick out some sliced white bread, it will most likely have been made either with the American sponge-and-dough system or the Chorleywood bread process. They are the Coke and Pepsi of the industrial bread world.
- onecrossbaker
Caught me at the right time.
I've been baking on and off for twenty years, but it's only recently I've started to consider what I'm working with in any detail.
I'm absolutely aware of the difference between British and imported wheat. Results are very much improved and work is made easier by using very strong Canadian flour, but supporting British business (I'm a Londoner) add complexity to the choice.
I buy flour made from British wheat, but it requires extra effort to achieve an almost-as-good result as when working with imported flour.
This difference is particularly interesting for me. The industry that provides my current career (I'm a CG artist) is undergoing significant changes. I look to the future and a contemplate a possible change of career.
Do I buy Canadian flour and deliver a product that people expect? Do I sacrifice a little of the result, at least while I learn how to work more effectively with British flour, in order to be able to promote myself as a small business supporting UK enterprise.
Decisions, decisions.
What an odd morning on HN.
- b800h
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.
- boudin
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.
- dare944
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.
- dwedge
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.
- riffraff
> 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.
- kazinator
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.
- giardini
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.