Being too far ill to bake last week, I was forced to buy bread for the first time in months – a Warburtons Toastie – bread so lacking in substance I ate two or three times more of it than my own bread, for the same effect. Tasted of bugger all, too, which toasting only marginally improved.
The wrapper says – hilariously, in view of what follows – “The ingredients that make this loaf special are – over 130 years of tradition, five generations of heritage, tonnes of quality and a touch of Warburtons magic.” There are, by the way, no apostrophes in Warburton-world.
This is what was in the loaf:-
Water,
Yeast,
Salt,
Vegetable oil,
Ascorbic acid (vitamin C)
So far, so good, that’s what I put in my bread, except that I use extra-virgin olive oil – but then it all gets a bit iffy with:-
Soya flour, (why?)
Emulsifiers E481 and E472e (which are, respectively, sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate, derived from lactic acid, and mono- and diacetyltartaric esters of mono- and di- glycerides of fatty acids, both apparently harmless, but why do you need emulsifiers in bread anyway?), then we have:-
Calcium propionate, to inhibit mould growth (not too successfully in my case), and flour treatment agents, including the Ascorbic acid mentioned above, and:-
E920, which is L-cysteine hydrochloride and L-cysteine hydrochloride monohydrate, all of which is a synthetic version of the amino acid, cysteine. And no, I have no idea what it does other than, in some undefined way, improve white flour (no doubt compensating for whatever’s been processed out of it. One reason I use unbleached white flour – the only thing missing is the bran.
Now, I know that commercial breadmaking is different to artisan breadmaking, or making it at home, but that’s an awful lot of non-food crap in there.
I’d also like to know how much wheat flour is in there, and how much has been replaced with cheaper soya flour (and what abominations were perpetrated to make the naturally grey soya flour white?).
OK, I accept a could have bought a slightly more expensive, unsliced loaf from the in-store “bakery” (though I just fancied a toaster for some reason), but that would still have been produced by the Chorleywood process, and would have probably had much the same crap in its make-up.
In future, though, I have to ensure that I always have a loaf in the freezer, and replace it every few weeks, to make sure it stays viable. Knocked-back after the first proving, roughly shaped and oiled to prevent freezer-burn, and bagged, it won’t take up much room. Then if I find myself stuck again, I just have to defrost it, shape it properly, and let it rise, before baking it. Including a little honey in the mix will ensure that the yeast has something to work with, initially, to give it an easy start to its second life, until it can get to work on the dough itself.
That should save me having to resort to store-bought bread in the future.
