Good Bread is Back

"I just love this book, and I love all his work. I keep banging on about how overrated Elizabeth David is in food history, but David writes—in English Bread and elsewhere, that French cuisine has been something so sacred that it’s just inevitably marvelous. But, actually, Good Bread is Back goes firmly against that narrative, because it’s the story of Kaplan’s efforts to save the baguette from industrial bakers. It led to an actual piece of legislation called l’ordinance Balladur which put in place the criteria for what a baguette could and could not contain. That’s now recognised by Unesco World Heritage. But it wasn’t before Kaplan’s intervention as an American in Paris; the French had been perfectly willing to allow the baguette to run downhill and become a much more ultra-processed kind of bread than we think is good nowadays. That’s right. Although it depends on the boulangerie. There’s a chain called Éric Kayser boulangeries —I think there are more than twenty now—which all craft a thing called the baguette Monge or sometimes the baguette tradition , which uses what the French call ‘old dough’ as the basis for the fermentation. So there’s an element of sourdough. But virtually every other grocery will be selling something pretty indistinguishable from what is sold in upmarket supermarkets over here. And if you go to Carrefour, or somewhere like that, you will smell the fresh bread , but it will be what’s called ‘bake off’ in the trade—it’s also called the ‘Milton Keynes process’ that produces the dough, hilariously—essentially they just push a lot of additives into it. It qualifies as an ultra-processed food because of the enormous amount of gluten it contains, and the preservatives, the stabilisers, the fat… it can just about be sold as ‘bread’, but you’re not supposed to sell it as a ‘baguette’. But it’s wonderful in places, and you can also get fantastic bread in Britain now. But around 90% of the bread flour sold in Britain is augmented with high gluten flour from the Canadian wheat belt. The average gluten content of a loaf made in the 19th century would have been around eight or nine percent. Now, that’s more like eleven to fourteen percent. If you use low-gluten flour, you have to put way more time into baking, spend longer kneading it, give it longer periods of rest, a much longer rise. It’s a much heavier workload for the baker. Basically, Canadian wheatbelt flour is a shortcut. And like all shortcuts, it has its disadvantages. It’s been argued that the higher gluten content is one of the reasons that we’re seeing so much celiac disease and so much gluten intolerance. People’s systems have just been overloaded with gluten that they are not genetically equipped to handle—in the way that many Asians can’t tolerate dairy. Bannocks, yes. That’s very standard. It’s what cake used to be. The cake started as a bannock, and our idea of something puffy and sweet is very recent. It was basically something crisp and kind of hard. There’s also an interesting argument as to whether that’s when our teeth went bad."