Excerpts from article by Andrew Whitley
The Biggest change of all occurred when the Chorleywood Bread Process was invented in the Sixties. This is the way most British bread is made to this day. It dramatically speeded up the process.Its method was high-speed mixing, using intense energy (about six times as much as a craft baker uses to mix his dough), a plethora of additives, greatly increased yeast quantities and no fermentation time.
Before Chorleywood - indeed, for all of man’s bread-making history - bakers took time to let their dough rise (or ferment). That way, the small amount of yeast they put in could multiply and react with the flour to produce enough gas to aerate the bread.
Most bread was made in a two-stage process over 12 to 16 hours. Time ripened the dough, making it easier for the baker to handle and tastier to eat.
But advances in molecular science have revealed an even more significant role of time in bread-making.
As you allow dough to ferment, it neutralises some of the bits of wheat protein that are most likely to trigger bowel disease and other auto-immune and inflammatory reactions to gluten.
Unfortunately, almost all British bread is now made from ‘no time dough’. Which is bad news for our bowels.
Chorleywood was a triumph of efficiency: you could get from raw flour to wrapped loaf in under three hours.
But there were also the additives. Quite a few of them, in fact. Potassium bromate (now banned in the UK as a possible cancer producer), azodicarbonamide (also banned), L-cysteine hydrochloride, sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate and so on — the list was long.
To avoid too many frightening chemical names, bread labels were allowed to group the nasties under bland headings such as ‘flour treatment agent’ and ‘emulsifier’.
Some additives were belatedly banned (including the bleaching of flour with chlorine gas in 1999), but new ones filled the gap and, if anything, the list is longer today than 30 years ago.
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