How the Chorleywood Bread Process transformed British bread
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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.
In the US, most high quality flours will state their protein percentage reasonably prominently on the label. It’s not particularly hard to buy commercial flour at a fairly wide range of protein levels - 13.5% and even higher protein flours are available and inexpensive. And (lucky for us?) they’re basically all farmed in the US.
But in Europe, the labels seem more interested in ash content and the milling technique, and, at best, the protein can sometimes be inferred from the nutritional information. The last time I shopped for bread flour in Europe, I found a Canadian flour with sort of acceptable protein at a very high price, and I found a Croatian “Pizza” flour that was even better at a lower price.
Do not take American mass-produced sandwich bread as any kind of product that Europeans should wish they had :)
At the same time, we have legions of new-age Rogan-adjacent food influencers on both sides of the Atlantic droning on about how American flour makes them bloated and tired (a line that Rogan himself repeats ad nauseam) while European flour avoids all of these problems.
There are so many things for which modern mass or mass-ish production methods can produce results as good or better than artisanal techniques. Nails, knives [0], textiles, etc are all examples as long as one is considering a modern example that is trying to be good.
But a halfway decent loaf of bread made using hundreds-of-years-old techniques (albeit probably with modern yeast [1] if it’s not sourdough) is just dramatically better than “modern” bread, even though the latter often contains highly engineered ingredients and is made with extreme precision.
[0] I know it’s kind of sad, but a well designed blade cut from a sheet of high quality steel and beveled appropriately is better than even a very, very well made Japanese knife made from the alloys that, for some reason, are still state of the art in Japan. I do imagine that a highly skilled artisan could produce an even better knife from modern steels, but this is a rarity and is very, very expensive.
[1] Actual modern yeast is dramatically better than your average supermarket yeast, in flavor, performance and convenience. In the US market, this means that you should use SAF, not Red Star. Good sourdough starter is still just an artisanal thing.
I looked at some recently in the UK and the nutritional information is always per 100g and says e.g. 11.5g protein. Is there something wrong with that meaning 11.5% without any inference, or are continental European nutritional information boxes presented differently?
I imagine that the 11.5g you’re looking at really does mean 11.5%.
In any case, I think that the basic bread flours from King Arthur and Bob’s Red Mill are decently high in protein. King Arthur Bread Flour is 12.7% and they sell even higher protein flours. Bob’s Red Mill doesn’t obviously list a percentage, but the nutrition facts suggest it’s around 13%.
If you make sourdough, have a crack at using standard supermarket flour and then try adding some organic stone ground or other expensive flour with special snob factor.
I am far from expert but notice a big difference.
(I’d say to try 100% organic stoneground but getting a good rise can be quite hard).
The specific one whose flours I use for my (very amateur) bread baking is Shipton Mill. I tend to make my bread using some of their very strong Canadian flour and some of their others which are weaker but possibly produce more interesting-tasting bread. (I do not guarantee that I would actually notice the difference in a blind test. I haven't tried.) One of the other flours I use is made from some continental-European and some British wheat. Another is all-British.
(I am not personally all that concerned whether my flour-buying supports British businesses; I'm just one person making a small amount of bread for my own family's use and the impact of my flour purchases on the national economy is a rounding error on top of a rounding error.)
As others have said, you could try using not-Canadian wheat and adding some vital wheat gluten. I haven't tried doing this myself but my understanding is that it works about as well as using stronger flour to begin with. It might make your ingredient lists a little less appealing if you're going to be doing this commercially, though.
Ships three times a week from Halifax docked at Birkenhead's grain elevator. The flour was then transferred to the mill over the road. British wheat flour (refined) at that point in history (60s) could not get to more than about 9% protein, not really enough to raise a loaf.
Common Market (? 1975) and we have tariffs &c so British wheat gets some serious cross-breeding attention. And now you can get home grown strong white flour above 11.5g. I think there was a similar story with Sugar cane and beet. The old Spillers mill is now flats, and the grain elevator was demolished decades ago.
But, yes, a few of the ships still come and yes you can get Canadian flour at 14 to 15%. One local artisan baker uses French flour as a matter of principle. Others don't specify the source. I'd say develop your recipes and go for it.
Then, you would get 75% of the local support benefit while having a potentially better product.
(ratios theoretical; you know more than me!)
I guess others are no angels either, but at least they have regulations with teeth and less corrupt politicians.
Just buy what you want and certainly do not _prefer_ British. If they don't care about your health why should you care about their bottom line....
what is up with Canadian flour? Just recently we were talking to an acquaintance here in Bay Area who makes her own bread from specially ordered Canadian flour.
I suppose you save shipping costs, and I'm aware that flour processed to remove the gluten is prized for cakes.
It good when making pizza and makes bread rise nicely.
The retail case is interesting, although maybe not indicative of wholesale
I suppose this is a function of whether gluten is a usable by-product of making low-protein cake flour. In that case i would expect industrial bread to simply add by-product gluten to cheaper flour. But that might obviate the search for higher-gluten wheat that the article describes. Really, i need more data.
Tipo 00 is great for making pasta and pizza, but it can be hard to get.
I as 50g or so to a batch of normal bread to help it out. It’s pretty unscientific but it works.
Also: don’t spill it. If makes glue and is hard to clean off. It sets like rock.
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.
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. They've also sprinkled on dried flakes of basil or oregano, without sufficient moisture or time to rehydrate them. 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? It's the same with rice, and frozen meals: your food, fats, and sauce are laid over a bed of cooked rice, and it would take hours to properly soak in and marry the flavors. 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.
People in fact don't eat dull white sliced bread in anything like the quantity they did. The majority of bread sold might be like that but we just eat less bread full stop.
But first, when you say "this godawful bread", what exactly do you mean? Chorleywood is a process, not an outcome. It's not just the template pre-sliced white/wholemeal/brown loaf thing from the three big brands. Quite a lot of bread you might think is not Chorleywood essentially is.
Go to even a larger French supermarket and buy a baguette, and that will very likely be a Chorleywood-based process. Much in-store-bakery bread is a modified Chorleywood process (if it is not, it is another similarly "ultra-processed" method, apparently called Activated Dough Development).
Most supermarket "sourdough type" bread, even some quite expensive stuff, is a modified Chorleywood process. Most ciabatta are.
I don't really eat "cut loaf" bread anymore for quite immediate health reasons — it invariably causes acid reflux and then skin irritation, so I gave it up a long time back. But I do still eat the odd part-baked bread roll and even some of those are Chorleywood process.
There is a good chance that if you're in a posh café you're still eating a Chorleywood-type bread. Because it is a way of making bread at scale; it is not a single product outcome.
I assume this is one reason why most supermarket "sourdough type" bread is, well, not good. (Sure, it's better than the cheapo sliced-white stuff. There's a lot of space between that and actually-good.)
I don't claim to know for sure that no bread made with Chorleywood-type processes is good. I am fairly sure, though, that no bread I've had that I have good reason to suspect was made that way has ever been much good.
(One specific complaint: It tends to have crumb that lacks elasticity. If you try to spread anything fairly thick on it -- soft cheese, say -- it tears and crumbles.If I do the same thing with one of my own loaves, the crumb flexes but doesn't tear or disintegrate. This isn't the only thing I find unsatisfactory about even supposedly fancy supermarket bread, but it's a thing I can describe fairly explicitly rather than just waving my hands and saying "well, it's just not good, you know?".)
I want to say that I also find Chorleywood bread to be "noticeable" somehow, because it feels like it always is compared to my local artisan place, but I have realised this evening while reading about the other common accelerated process used here — ADD — on this impressive page:
https://domson.co.uk/gb/academy/bread-technology/dough-mixin...
… that it might be difficult to tell these two processes apart from each other meaningfully by taste. Whereas the difference from non-industrialised, slow-fermented bread is usually pretty obvious.
(FWIW I do still eat the supermarket sourdoughs along with part-baked things, because the artisan place is less convenient — though it has just started to offer a terrifyingly convenient delivery service -- but mainly I am doing this to slow down my bread consumption even further; ultimately I feel healthier if I eat less bread.)
British food has come a long way over time, though there is still that subculture the rejoices in shite, or "proper" as they call it, food.
At least we can feel superior to the US on this front, who produce the worst bread I've ever eaten.
Do you mean south of London?
I'm glad we're not describing the relationship between Greenland and Iceland as Greenland is farther east, west, north and south of Iceland.
One of the effects of the strike was that white sliced was in short supply and mangled people ended up with weird granary loaves etc as they were all that was left in the shelves. They liked them.
And from that day granary and seeded breads became a lot more popular over the bland spongy white sliced stuff.
I will say that whatever the failings of white sliced, I still prefer it to over-sweetened US bread.
This is another big surprise to Americans, which went from no running water to high-pressure mains.
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.
But we all do this with our own stanky poop.
Still a vastly better mechanical design than what they make you use in the US: they barely hold in the socket.
People who prefer plugs that are fun to step on are doing electrical interfaces wrong!
The US plug (NEMA 1-15P is the 2-prong version, or 5-15P for the most common 3-prong grounded) is actually pretty decent. They stay in sockets pretty well if the sockets aren't bottom-of-the-barrel garbage products which, sadly, many things in the US are in general.
What many people miss when comparing US and EU plugs are that they're actually doing fairly different jobs. The 120V mains in the US is significantly less trouble than the 240V in Europe, so you can get away with a lot less mechanically on the plug. The US NEMA 6-15P plug design (the 240V version of the standard plug) is, accordingly, kind of shit. But at least it's rare enough that receptacles tend to be of decent quality, which mitigates a lot. The locking versions (L5-15R etc) are actually quite good, and should almost always be used when possible and appropriate. They're good to 480V and even a bit beyond -- not just working but actually good -- and you can't say that about most EU plug designs. You guys have those horribly bulky pin-and-sleeve disasters and we get nice NEMA locking plugs for our three-phase.
One of the other things that European plugs have to deal with, and US plugs don't, is that European electricians have no idea how to separate hot and neutral wires and basically wire them up randomly. This has major consequences in a lot of product design and is really really annoying when you're trying to build something safe. (Namely: in the US you're often (but not always) not allowed to fuse neutral wires. That makes sense, for safety reasons. You have to fuse hot... but in Europe you don't know which one is hot, so you have to fuse them both. Which means you just fused neutral. Design conflict!) That shows up in the plugs, too; with no idea where hot is, you have to be more careful and can't use neutral to help you out.
But in all other respects the British mains plug design is really rather good. It does a good job of making partially-plugged-in plugs still safe, it's nice and robust, it readily stays firmly plugged in, etc.; US plugs are much worse in these respects and I think so are typical continental European ones.
European ones mostly stay in the socket. But I guess they ain't quite as cleverly designed as the British ones.
But my point about electrocution risk is that 240V is not twice as dangerous as 120V. It's actually much, much worse. And 480V is worse still. We used to say that screwing up 120V will hurt you, 240V will kill you, and 480V will kill you, start your corpse on fire, and blind everyone around you. So the design requirements for all 240V class plugs are much more important.
> not falling out of walls ... is up to the manufacturer
This one is a real problem in the US because there is a standard, it is a good standard, parts are made and tested to the standard, and standards-compliant parts work very well. But few people require the damn standard. If you want good receptacles in the US, get stuff that's marked "Federal Specification W-C-596 rated" (aka "Fed Spec"; "Spec Grade" is self-certified to... something... which is... not the same thing... but in practice the manufacturers seem not to abuse that term too much; often lower-volume part numbers seem only to be available as "Spec Grade" presumably due to testing cost). It will perform well.
For the British standard, pretty much any plug you can buy will be fine.
However the plug is actually a really good piece of engineering. There’s so many subtle design features to it that can be genuinely life saving. The only drawback is the often cited problem of stepping on one, to which I say “you shouldn’t be leaving plugs on the floor anyway. And it’s still better that than having kids electrocute themselves or your house burning”
Of course, any rational British person would instantly understand that the best way to ensure safety is to have every single person wiring up every single plug in their house.
For that last point, I’ve often ended up cutting the plug off new kitchen appliances, thread the cable, then wire a new plug afterwards.
Where would you put the fuse, then?
Also, if you think that's "Not Great", just take a look at the concentrated pile of sketchiness that passes for domestic wiring in the US. Every single house in the US is an electrical fire waiting to happen - and with "balloon frame" construction which is purpose-designed to both reduce construction costs and ensure the complete destruction of the building with even a minor fire, you've got plenty for that to work with.
Balloon framing itself isn't crazy though: look at Scandinavia (maybe excluding Norway since their electrical system is a bit... special) for the same type of home construction (Western Framing Construction or whatever it's called), but with in-wall conduit and star system like in continental Europe.
In the electrical panels, of course. You'd only need fuses in the plug if you wired up your home with a braindamaged topology like a ring circuit. (Alas, ring circuits are very common in British home wiring.)
So how do you know what size to fit?
Or do you just get in about your panels and replace them every time you unplug a lamp to plug in a TIG welder?
I suspect that Chorleywood bread made with stone ground whole wheat flour is better for you than home made four ingredient white bread. (with the caveat that Chorleywood probably doesn't work with such flour).
Fermentable carbohydrates are prebiotics and feed your gut flora, which produces short-chain fatty acids that are healthy for you.
But yes, you also get gas from FODMAPs. And no, I am not advocating for processed foods - just wanted to comment on the FODMAP aspect.
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?
That's just not true. It allowed to industrials using british wheat to compete against industrials using canadian wheat. Another approach could have been to protect artisan baker instead of going all in with the industrialisation of food production.
> 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?
Because bakery are seen as a specialty, and do not sell high volumes. You just have to cross the channel to see that real bread doesn't need to be that expensive and small bakers can compete with industrials.
It's right there in the article, in the postwar years the UK was reliant on imported Canadian and other wheats, the process allowed the UK to use its own wheat. "Artisan" bread was not a thing in the early 1960s, AFAICT at that point in time Britain had an extremely impoverished food sector.
> Because bakery are seen as a specialty, and do not sell high volumes. You just have to cross the channel to see that real bread doesn't need to be that expensive
France seems to be a bit of an outlier here AFAICT. But is 'real' bread even that expensive in the UK?
Look, you can get a 24hr sourdough loaf at Tesco for 2 quid - https://www.tesco.com/shop/en-GB/products/272914228 - or 3.75 for the 800g version. And you can tell it's not chorleywood because there's no Ascorbic acid or added oils. Real bread is available at any given supermarket if you want it.
If your real complaint is "Why don't we have France's bakery culture?" well I think that goes a lot deeper.
Then there are things like Festival des pains (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festival_des_Pains in french) which is a group of mills, provides training recipes and flours. You see there bread a lot (like the Festive baguette). Those are still proper bread and the quality will vary depending on the baker. Most often bakers will have a mix of those breads and their own recipes. The branding tends to make those standard recipes more visible though.
In term of viennoiseries (croissants etc...), most bakers don't make their own and relies on industrial ones. It can be quite hard to spot, the best way to know that is if it mentions "Fait maison" (this can only be mentioned if it is made on the spot using raw ingredients if I'm not mistaken).
I find french supermarket bread not better than UK ones, it's the same technique and same crap result.
In all my life and travels I've never had bread nearly as good as the French baguette and I've always wondered why.
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.
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...)
It really makes me wonder what else is going on everywhere else, because it really comes down to just flour, water, salt, and yeast.
Then I discovered Jim Lahey's no-knead bread recipe, which gave me virtually the same results, for a grand total of 5 minutes of active work.
The first thing I noticed travelling to France as a Brit is everything you eat is delicious. This has changed a bit now; they have McDonald's in France now. But 30 years ago it was mostly true. You could buy a sandwich from a railway station and it would be the best sandwich of your life. It took me a while to realise why. The British and American way to prepare food is to take any old crap but use just one or two strong flavours like bacon, cheese, pickle etc and let it carry the whole thing. The French way (and even more so Italian for that matter) is to take a handful of already delicious ingredients and combine them into something greater than their parts. French sandwiches taste good because the bread tastes good, the butter tastes good, the ham tastes good, and the cheese tastes good. That's the secret.
do this. thank me later. (yes, it takes multiple days!). as good as when we hop over to France.
The long, slow fermentation allows those complex flavors to develop naturally. Combine that high hydration with a really hot, steam-injected oven, and you get the sudden expansion needed for that perfect crispy crust and open crumb...
Interesting stuff.
Stop obsesing with 2-4% diference in gluten! English flour, Americans flour - just make dough denser and it will keep shape longer before going flat.
Especially if you bake in baking pan! In pan anything keeps bread (actually pan :> ) shape! Corn, buckwheat, rice, whatever.
Without pan "week gluten" make bread flat. But on the other hand week gluten flour is better for cakes makers.
Without gluten and pan you can make pancakes-like bread what still is called bread in some current but ancient traditions.
O, and "wheat only bread" started to be so popular (as in: be only one thing called bread) only when yeasts has been discovered and only in West Europe / North America culture. Even Germany still is using a lot of rye and Mexico is using a lot of corn...
And to article subject: yea, mixing harder adds a lot of air into dough and when heated gas expands so bread "grows"... And, especially in pan, it looks "normal"... But intensive mixing also kills yeasts that create CO^2 in dough so it kills bread growth... So, yeah, you realy need that gluten so air is trapped in the dough :)
Also short bread growth time kills taste... But you can faster push whatever-you-are-making to customers!
And that suposedly "american" "sponge-and-dough" is just ancient and global way of making bread...
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."
And imho the British kind, especially, does not even deserve to be called by the same name.
The French have some decent bread, if you can live without the taste of rye for a while.
I get it, sometimes it's fun to follow a story. But I also read a dozen or so paragraphs, then started scrolling, then gave up.
> 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.
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.
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.
> The guiding principle of the Chorleywood Bread Process (I’m paraphrasing, of course) is that instead of depending for the most part on fermentation to generate all those bubbles of CO2 that later become the “cell structure” of microscopic holes in a loaf of bread, something similar could be achieved by beating that dough to within an inch of its life in a massive mechanical mixer.
It's much the same for all soft (tin) loaves sold across Europe. The exception being breads with crusts - baguettes and rolls etc. and rye bread.
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.
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.
Also you can certainly make a high hydration dough with 11% protein flour but it'll probably be mediocre at best. I highly doubt it'll be worth the effort you'd need to put into it versus a higher protein flour.
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.
Good old post-WW2 poverty thinking that never went away because profit
People complain a lot about AI written articles, but is this any better? I don't think so, I don't care who authors it but I don't want discursions and distractions.
It's still better than slop though.
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.
The rural families a few decades ago in most Asian countries did not need millers, bakers or any other salesmen.