J and I have, completely unplanned, caught some documentary shows about food and food processing recently, and bread was among the topics. Perhaps due to that, or perhaps due to our gradually changing up such things every so often anyway, we also recently changed what bread we eat. The recent type gets moldy faster, which was disappointing for a moment before I realized it was actually indicative of a good thing.
Hear me out.
Bread used to be a pretty healthy food. Au natural, as it were, it’s made of only four ingredients: Flour, yeast, water, and salt. That’s it. But then over time, fewer people were making it for themselves as bakeries made more of it in growing towns and then cities. And ultimately we wound up with a lot of bread made by massive, centralized bakeries serving ever-sprawling populations.
But how to get it to the distant consumers before the bread started going bad?
Why, preservatives, of course!
This gave way, along with particularly the North American penchant for sugar, to the ultra-processed, mass marketed kinds of bread we see dominating grocery store shelves today. Leave such bread on the counter for a week or two and you’ll see no mold on it and probably taste very little difference from when it was first purchased.
That’s a breakthrough for the massive bread companies, but isn’t doing your health any favours.
What you want, dear reader, is exactly the opposite of that: The most simple kinds of bread with the really short ingredient lists. Eat it quickly before it goes moldy, which will happen way sooner than you probably have come to expect. But when that does happen, take heart that it’s only because you’ve done yourself a good thing by buying something way closer to the way bread is supposed to be.
My local supermarket used to bake its own bread on the premises, albeit from dough that was sent to them from somewhere else. For years I’ve been buying the same, 800g wholemeal loaf, which was sort of in the middle for mould generation. It would last maybe five days in dry conditions before mould developed, although it would usually have been eaten before we got there.
A few months ago the company decreed they would bake their bread centrally and deliver it ready-to-shelve instead and they also discontinued the large wholemeal loaf, leaving only the half-size 400g loaf, which costs 80% the price of the big one. I stopped buying it as a result and moved to a bagged, sliced, seeded wholemeal loaf instead, which I have to admit is delicious. That one, however, will happily sit for a couple of weeks without growing mould and tastes much the same throughout.
I’d like to go back to a more old-fashioned option, and also to a large, unsliced wholemeal loaf, but to get one I’d have to get in the car and drive for at least fifteen minutes, which seems ridiculous. I can buy unsliced, vaguely artisanal bread in at least three shops in walking distance but large wholemeal loaves are apparently not commercial enough for any of them to make.
I do find myself on sporadic kicks to find good quality breads, which often ends up in disappointment unless I go out of my way to one of our (luckily numerous and relatively nearby) local bakeries. It’s not cheap, compared to the mass market stuff, but when you’ve gotta have it, it’s worth it.
Nice to hear that you found something more readily available but fits the bill of being what you’re looking for and lasts a good while. the stuff I’m getting of late is from a local bakery but that distributes pretty widely, making it pretty easy to come by with everyday shopping runs, although there’s no way it would last a couple of weeks, at least in our summer climate.
To your point about the particularly good stuff, agreed, it often doesn’t make it home when I buy it. At least not all of it. I’d say that may be part of the tell of really good bread, as well, is how good it is just on its own, ripped off from the loaf and eaten on the spot, toppings be damned. I find getting it home and smearing it with a bit of butter is among my favourite noshes full stop, and I’m normally something of a sugary snack guy, so that’s saying something.
I’ve considered making my own for a while (not sure if the same happened in your neck of the woods, but in North America there was a huge trend toward baking your own bread during our Covid lockdowns, particularly sourdough, which is among my favourites), but as straight-forward as the ingredient list of quality bread goes, making my own still seems a bridge too far. Probably for the best, of course, because if I started being able to consistently make my own good bread, there’d be no end of it around the house. Although perhaps that’s not a bad thing…