The Chorleywood Experiment (2023)
historic-uk.com
historic-uk.com
Only 80%? I'm in the UK now and it seems all but impossible to buy bread not made this way. It's as though bread here is made for people without teeth.
All the lidl's within 20 miles have in store bakeries and do the same and you can order that stuff from all the major supermarkets.
kwhitefoot is correct and the vast majority of bread in the UK is not what you think it is.
The bread in these two stores is mostly baked in a factory and then delivered to the store where it may be heated for a golden crust (at most). The ancient grain sourdough is (likely) just mostly wheat bread [1].
In my personal experience, I was always suspicious of the "fresh sourdough bread" at Tesco. It was far too soft to be real sourdough bread and now I think it was a straight-up lie- sorry just a marketing label.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jun/11/fou...
[1] https://www.sustainweb.org/news/dec23-lidl-sourdough-sourfau...
If you want to pay 40p for a loaf of bread, Chorleywood is the way that happens. If you don't mind paying £2.50 for an artisan loaf that you can't figure out how to slice that's cool too.
Dippy soldiers probably don't benefit from using the slow expensive process. A ham sandwich probably does.
And where is the magical 1GBP loaf that is done on mass scale, but is properly fermented? It's not as if in other parts of the world is not full of that type of bread.
I have to say though it isn't easy. It's hard to find good bread in the UK. I had a salmon sandwich on a good wholmeal sourdough at a shop in the Canary Wharf tube station in 2015 and I still remember it.
The only way I've found to have a decent loaf of bread in the UK is to make it myself. I kinda recommend it. I don't really care about breadmaking, like I'm not seriously into it, but the bread I make at home is just decent bread and it's tough to find that in the shops.
And don't buy flour from the supermarket, either. I once tried the wholewheal flour from the Waitrose, after I got fed up with their wholemeal loaf tasting like cardboard. Well, the bread I made with their flour tasted exactly the same as their bread. There's something wrong not only with breadmaking, but also with flour sold in this country. But you can get good bread flour (hard white, wholemeal, spelt, rye, barley, anything you want) if you look around online a bit.
For flour the best places to get good flour are either online[2] or in expensive healthfood shops. The one near me that does good flour is where all the local yoga mums buy their candles and whatnot but they do great bacheldre spelt flour for example. But Dove's Farm flour for example is generally pretty good and easy to come by even in supermarkets if you go to a waitrose for example.
[1] Gails and Ole and Steen. If you're a serious snob you can criticise both because the dough isn't made on the premises, it's made centrally and then just baked in the shop but it's still good bread.
[2] https://www.bakerybits.co.uk for example is great.
[3] https://www.danlepard.com/ He's one of the top sourdough bakers in the world, to the extent that Michellin starred-restaurants have been known to get him in as a consultant to come up with the breads to go alongside the rest of their menus.
Beyond that - visit a bakers or a market or something.
They certainly give the impression that it is though!
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jun/11/fou...
[1]: https://www.sustainweb.org/news/dec23-lidl-sourdough-sourfau...
But yes, I'm not surprised the supermarkets skirt as close as they can to the law and mislabel with wanton abandon.
Best stick to independent bakers where possible.
Chorley wood bread makes *terrific* toast. This explains its popularity in Blighty.
> I'm in the UK now and it seems all but impossible to buy bread not made this way.
Utter rubbish! 30 years ago maybe, but these days even small corner shops (let alone large supermarkets) will offer quality fresh breads from a local bakery.
There's a real bread campaign: https://www.sustainweb.org/realbread/
Here in the northern Scottish highlands it's hard to find good bread. Which led us to learn to bake our own sourdough. But there are some good things popping up, like a local baker who is now doing a People's Loaf pay as you can https://www.northern-times.co.uk/news/sutherland-artisan-bak...
And the other stuff that is venerated, like Danish or French bread, is equally dull white chewy fluff.
I have spent a lot of time in Norway and lived in Czechia for a decade, and their bread is so much better than the finest freshly-baked straight-from-the-oven French bread I've tasted that it's a whole different food.
And I am really sorry to my Scots friends but this goes for "Scottish Plain" as well.
And no, the fancy artisanal sourdough stuff you can get now for some ridiculous prices is not much better. It's the same pallid bland pap, but crunchier.
I make cheese toasties and things from Czech bread. IMHO it is way better. And I grew up with the white square stuff. :shrug:
Apparently the US had its own industrialised bread process decades earlier that resulted in "Wonder Bread".
The Chorleywood bread process is a method of dough production to make yeasted bread quickly, producing a soft loaf. It allows the dough to be made with lower-protein wheat and it uses more yeast, added fats, chemicals.
80% of all the bread made in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and India, use the process.
Some beers are brewed at a higher gravity and then diluted with water to bring to the correct strength - this allows the breweries to get more beer out of their brewing capacity.
Additionally the UK also makes very high quality malt including malt made from heritage grains and floor malted, which I've had in IPA form.
There are many decent IPAs available in the UK, such as American style ones comparable to beers such Heady Topper etc. Or more traditional ones such as made by Fullers etc.
Check out breweries such as Thornbridge / Verdant / Polly's / Cloudwater / Siren / DEYA etc.
Very curious as to what IPAs you've had.
Go for cask real-ales on the big pumps rather than craft beers off the keg taps, and you're drinking old-school British beers brewed in the way they have been brewed for hundreds of years. Some of them will be IPAs. Most of them will be in the range of 3-6% alcohol.
They don't tend to be as massively hopped and flavoured as the newer 'craft' styles, they are less fizzy (natural carbonation only, rather than forced keg carbonation) and might be kinder to your head as a result.
More on the process here https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/concentrated-beer...
Someone has sold you a fairytale about IPA production because they don't like the style.
(edit - you'll notice at those shops they are selling all sorts of styles as concentrates, including "Polish hopped beer" - https://browin.com/shop/beer-brewing/coopers-concentrates )
Not something I'm interested in. But it certainly doesn't support your weird assertion that IPAs in particular are all made from concentrate.
I think you have a number of things mixed up in your head here.