My new book, Trade World, is out NOW. In an effort to try to nudge you into buying a copy, here is a little essay featuring one of the most fascinating, obscure stories from the Trade World. And, as an added incentive, if you buy a copy in the next few days and email me at [email protected] attaching a proof of purchase, I will send you an exclusive essay with even more bonus material!
The next time you eat a sandwich, one of those triangular ones you get from a supermarket or Pret, or put some sliced bread into your toaster, pause for a moment and take a close look at the bread. On the surface of it you will see hundreds of little holes - cells, as bakers sometimes call them.
I suspect you’ve never paid them all that much attention. I certainly hadn’t. That was until I discovered that those cells are a clue to one of the most fascinating stories in postwar history. For the little holes in British sliced white bread - not to mention bread in everywhere from South Africa to Australia (though not America or Singapore - as we’ll get to in a moment) are the surface manifestation of an extraordinary shift in the way bread was made.
It is thanks to this shift that, unbeknownst to most of the people consuming it, sliced bread in Britain is actually made in a starkly different way to how bread used to be made for thousands of years. Indeed, by some standards, British bread is a markedly different foodstuff to bread elsewhere; some purists would go so far as arguing that it isn’t actually bread.
But this isn’t just about taste. This is about a little-known revolution in food that, grandiose as this will probably sound, represented one of the most significant industrial strategy interventions in modern British history. This bread revolution changed the entire equation of this country’s food chain, transforming farming throughout the nation in the process. So, yes, this is a very big deal.
But, this being bread - plain, simple sandwich bread - few are even aware of what has become known as the Chorleywood Bread Process. Even fewer know about its backstory, a backstory that begins, you’ve guessed it, in the Trade World.
There are a few straightforward reasons I chose bread as one of the three products whose story we follow in my new book: for one thing, if you understand the origins of bread you start to understand the very beginnings of trade - as grain was traded around the earliest civilisations in the Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia. You begin to understand the invention of “supply chains” (cities have always been dependent on food supply chains, from ancient Ur and Uruk to modern day London and New York). You realise the extent to which the world around is sometime quite precariously perched on these supply chains.
No wheat; no bread. That equation is etched deep into the historical record. Any time food runs short, or gets too expensive, it precipitates riots. That’s part of the backstory of the French Revolution and the Arab Spring. You could make the case that, in a sense, it’s also part of the backstory for the cost of living crisis the UK and Europe have been suffering for the past few years. Higher energy costs; higher food costs; more discontent.
But the other reason bread is such a fascinating topic comes back to something else. For all that it is invariably treated as a sort of archaic product - the ultimate homespun foodstuff - in fact bread is in many respects the ultimate product of technology and trade (which is sort of what Trade World is all about).
Though the French treat the baguette as a part of their national heritage, in fact it’s a surprisingly modern invention, younger than the Tour Eiffel or the Tour de France. Or consider the Italian ciabatta - that lovely rustic, white bread with big, attractive holes in the crumb. While it is sometimes marketed as the fruit of some ancient Italian tradition, it was actually invented in the early 1980s, making it a little bit younger than me.
More to the point, the ciabatta depends for its production on modern breadmaking techniques, chief among them high-hydration doughs. And in order to pull off high hydration doughs you need “strong” modern flours with very high gluten and protein levels. And for the most part, even in Italy, those flours have to be imported. There is no making ciabattas - or many other types of modern breads - without wheat that often comes from the other side of the world.
That comes back to a pretty fundamental point - a point that will seem slightly arcane to start off with, but has had profound consequences. Not all wheat is alike. Take a train through the English countryside and much of the wheat you see growing in the fields would not typically have qualified to be used in breadmaking. That is because most of the wheat grown in this country lacks the features bakers have historically looked for in good flour.
Chief among those features is protein, or (since it’s more or less the same thing) gluten. Gluten is what helps flour, when mixed with water, salt and either yeast or some sourdough starter, develop that stretchy elastic form. And that elasticity turns out to be the critical thing you’re after when baking nice big lofty loaves, since it traps the carbon dioxide produced by the dough as it ferments. The more protein you have, the bigger the air pockets you can produce in your loaves.
It is moderately easy to grow wheat with 11–12 per cent protein. It is quite hard, in most parts of the world, to ratchet the protein level up to 13 per cent or beyond (though paradoxically the drier the summer, the higher the protein levels, meaning this summer’s wheat harvest is likely to be unusually glutenous). Getting the number up to 14 or 15 per cent takes extraordinary luck or superhuman dedication, but if they want to ensure a good loft in their bread, those are the sorts of numbers bread makers often look for.
British wheat from typically soggy British fields is relatively low protein. But wheat coming from the dry American prairies and places like Manitoba and Saskatchewan in Canada have wonderfully high protein levels. All of which is to say, for as long as Europeans had an appetite for white bread (an appetite which went into overdrive after WWII, when they discovered the wonders of American sliced white bread from GIs stationed across the continent), they have had to import high protein wheat in from elsewhere - much of it from North America.
Back in the early post-war years, roughly 65 per cent of the wheat used for baking in Britain came from Canada, with only about 5 per cent of the local wheat passing muster for domestic bread production. And for the powers-that-be that represented a serious crisis. The country had barely just recovered from two world wars, during which its ability to feed itself was party a function of how much wheat it could ship in from Canada. Surely, the government asked, there was a technological way for Britain to be able to feed itself with its own wheat?
All of which brings us back to Chorleywood, a pretty little village just outside the M25 near London. That was the headquarters of a group called the British Baking Industries Research Association, a part government-funded industry body dedicated to trying to improve British bread. So the association sent out researchers to the mills of Minneapolis and the vast factories where Wonder Bread and Sunbeam were being baked to see how the Americans did it. The American bread making system was what is now known as the “sponge-and-dough” technique. Yeast is used to create a spongy mixture with flour and water that is left to ferment for five hours or so. Then some more flour, water, salt, fat and sugar are added to the fermented sponge to make the final dough, which can finally go in the oven. Voilà: a consistent white loaf that can then be sliced and packed.
But, this being the late 1950s and early 1960s, the age of industrial optimism and the “white heat” of innovation, the bakers at Chorleywood wondered whether maybe they could go one better. What if they could make a bread just as white and just as fluffy as American sliced white bread but even faster? So was born the Chorleywood Bread Process.
The guiding principle of the Chorleywood Bread Process (I’m paraphrasing, of course) is that instead of depending for the most part on fermentation to generate all those bubbles of CO2 that later become the “cell structure” of microscopic holes in a loaf of bread, something similar could be achieved by beating that dough to within an inch of its life in a massive mechanical mixer. This brute force method was, it turns out, phenomenally effective in turning a dough into something that could be baked into bread, far, far quicker than the American method. What once took hours could happen in minutes. The entire process, from start to finish, could happen in about half the time it took to make American white bread. It was, in short, a productivity miracle.
And not just that. An added bonus of the Chorleywood process was that you could also use flours from wheat that had lower protein/gluten content, in other words British wheat. I have a whole section in Trade World about this, including interviews with one of the leading lights in the technologies that made it possible, so I don’t want to repeat it all here, but for our sakes the key thing to focus on here is that the Chorleywood process completely transformed the nature of bread making, milling and, hence, farming in this country. Where once a white bread would have to depend on Canada for the majority of its wheat, you can now make a sliced white loaf with as much as 85 per cent British wheat.
Today, pretty much all sliced white bread in this country - nearly all the loaves you buy in the supermarket packed in plastic or waxes paper - is made using the Chorleywood Bread Process. It won’t say it on the label, of course. Nor will the label disclose that the bread still needs a certain amount of high protein wheat from 6,000 miles away. But this is nonetheless the hidden backstory of this everyday staple.
If you were looking for an example of an industrial strategy intervention that truly changed Britain’s terms of trade and rejuvenated domestic production (something the latest UK government talks about rather a lot), you could hardly do better than the Chorleywood Bread Process. In the decades after its invention in 1961, British bread became truly, well, British. And not just that. The process, and all the machinery that went alongside it, became an enormous export industry. The gospel of Chorleywood was spread around the world, with the result that gradually other countries adopted the same machines and the same process. As I write in Trade World:
If you go into any supermarket in the world and pick out some sliced white bread, it will most likely have been made either with the American sponge-and-dough system or the Chorleywood bread process. They are the Coke and Pepsi of the industrial bread world. North America? Sponge-and-dough. India? Chorleywood. Singapore? Sponge-and-dough. Shanghai? Chorleywood. Which raises another question: how can you tell the difference?
That brings us back to the “cellular structure” of the bread - those little holes I mentioned at the very start. Look at the holes in your bread and there you have a little clue as to whether it was made with the Chorleywood Bread Process or the American sponge-and-dough process. American industrial sliced bread tends to have round little holes in the surface. The holes in Chorleywood bread are slightly more elongated, slightly more elliptical, a consequence of the fact that the dough has been churned at such an extraordinary speed during its production.
The other difference, some would say, is that sponge-and-dough bread, industrial and bleached as it might look, over-sweetened as it usually is, not to mention doused in extra fats and emulsifiers, is, thanks to those hours of fermentation, at least a closer approximation to bread. That leaves us pondering the awkward question that has been hanging over our conversation. Is Chorleywood bread actually bread?
Either way, it’s an innovation that has changed the complexion of this country, without most people even realising it. The building in Chorleywood where bread changed forever is no longer a research institute for baking; it is now a nursing home. The British Baking Industries Research Association was disbanded after government support dried up some years ago. Britain no longer leads the world in bread research, but we are renowned, for better or worse, for having developed the world’s fastest method for mass-producing bread.
Wheat fields across the UK have become a part of the national bread food chain in a way they never were before. Industrial bread producers are able to produce bread far more cheaply than their predecessors (albeit that those Chorleywood mixers use an awful lot of power). The story of British bread provides some surprisingly rich lessons about economic policy and beyond, both for this country and further afield.
Trade World, is out NOW. In case you’re wondering, yes I do also spend quite a bit of time pondering posh sourdoughs as well as industrial bread - including a striking story about the world’s most iconic bakery. As I wrote above, if you buy a copyin the next few days and email me at [email protected] attaching a proof of purchase, I will send you an exclusive essay with even more bonus material. And if you want to hear more stories in person, I’ll be doing a bit of a book tour in the coming months. Full dates here. Come along and say hello!