The big bread question

The northern European diet is very bread-dependent, isn’t it?  Some of our most celebrated foods are breads or bread-based, or variations on the theme of yeast-raised-dough.  Think of a crisp fresh baguette, a springy focaccia or a dark, crusty rye loaf; think of pizza, think of home-made Danish pastries.  Or on second thoughts, maybe don’t think of them (I am making myself hungry, and I’ve already had my mid-morning snack).  

When I was a kid, in small-town England in the late sixties and the seventies, bread meant that white pappy stuff, ready-sliced sandwich loaves with a rubbery, rather gluey texture and no crust to speak of.  Wholemeal bread was referred-to as “brown” and probably wasn’t wholemeal at all; and it was if anything even more tasteless than white.  

The one exception, in my life at least, was when my mother and stepmum baked.  Mum tended to make white bread, but by an old-fashioned, slow process with three kneadings and three provings.  It was dense, golden-crusted and full of flavour, and a single slice with butter was as filling as a meal, and as delicious as cake.  My stepmother Jane baked knobbly wholemeal rolls, which she covered in poppy seed or sesame seed before proving and baking them; they were filling and flavoursome, and to this day any bread that tastes like Jane’s will take me back to memories of childhood.  Sometimes, for a really special occasion, she would make chollah, which was golden inside as well as out, and even more delicious.  

I’m hoping to work my way up to trying to create my own wholegrain home-made low-carb bread; but the ambition of that idea makes me quail a bit.  Bread-making is one of the few kinds of cookery that rely on accurate proportions and a degree of knowledge of the chemistry involved.  One can always throw a lot of random stuff in a pan and end up with a stew of some sort, but that just doesn’t work with yeast cookery.  Give me time, I’ll work my way up to it.

It isn’t too much of a problem, anyway, since these days there are plenty of decent, tasty breads available, for a price (though there’s still plenty of the squidgy pap around as well).  There are low-carb breads and extra-high-fibre breads, nut-free breads, dairy-free breads, high-protein breads, ancient-grain breads and even a moderately good choice of gluten-free breads.  Thank the gods for that, then.  It’s easy to romanticise the past as a more innocent era of organic agriculture, traditional customs and natural foods, but some aspects of it were rubbish, and British bread certainly went through a phase of being one of the rubbish things.

When I was diagnosed with diabetes, one of the things I did straight away (besides cutting out all sugar) was to reduce my carb intake to an absolute minimum.  This got to me badly (I hated having cold hardboiled eggs for breakfast, but getting up early to cook fresh eggs was even worse as I am emphatically not a morning lark).  So I’ve been slowly re-introducing some carbs since then, starting with a home-made sugar-free muesli, and pumpernickel and its cousins sonnenbrot and vollkornbrot (which for a while I thought was called volkenbrot – ah, “the people’s bread”, how poetic – oops, no).  Oats are digested fairly slowly, as are high-fibre unrefined carbs in general, so don’t cause as much of a blood glucose spike as refined carbs like white bread.  Breakfast feels like breakfast again now.  

Proper German and Austrian pumpernickel is about as high-fibre as a bread is ever going to get.  Fortunately I’ve always loved the stuff.  Its flavour is a mighty thing.  But the pumpernickel family aren’t made in the UK, they’re imported, and they cost a pretty penny.  

Most other special-diet breads are even more ferociously expensive, which makes it particularly galling if they then get stale and have to be thrown away.  One can only derive so much consolation from feeding the ducks, when what they’re getting for their lunch is several quids’ worth of unusably-dry special bread.  So I find having some ways to use up elderly bread handy.  

Vollkornbrot and sonnenbrot both make passable toast, if you keep them under a low flame (or a lower setting on the toaster) and cook them for longer (full-blast pumpernickel, not so much, but luckily that keeps the best; that said, they’re all pretty good keepers).  They go wambly at first, and then they make a strange hissing sound, and then slowly but surely they crispen up.  Most of the gf breads I’ve come across also toast well.

They also (with the exception, once again, of pumpernickel) make a decent eggy bread, bread-and-butter pudding and strata, its Italian savoury cousin, if you give them long enough to soak before cooking them.  

Next post will be some variations on the theme of eggy bread.  Now there's another of the tastes of childhood.  Mmm, eggy bread!