Читать книгу Bread Matters: The sorry state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own - Andrew Whitley - Страница 16

The great achievement of modern industrial baking was to make a superficially attractive loaf using a high proportion of home-grown wheat. This provided a market for British cereal farmers and saved the bakers the tariffs on imported – mostly Canadian – flour. But to turn British wheat into the kind of bread that most people appeared to want, new methods were required:

 Wheat hybrids were bred to take advantage of intensive chemical agriculture and to produce flour that suited industrial baking methods.

 Millers separated the whole wheat more completely into its constituent parts, ground the flour finer and added enzymes to make it more consistent.

 To make the dough rise quickly, bakers massively increased the amount of yeast.

 Time was squeezed out of the baking process, and with it not just flavour but vital nutritional benefits.

 Freshness was redefined and artificially induced by means of additives, some undeclared.

A technological and commercial triumph turned out to be a nutritional own-goal.