Yet another Hacker News

The little holes in your bread are telling you something

35 points baud147258 2 days ago 27 comments

snthpy 1 hour ago | parent

I was hoping this would be about a new way to augur the events of the day from my morning toast to ensemble with the tea leaves at the bottom of my morning cuppa, alas ...

giardini 52 minutes ago | parent

All I want to know is why are Parisian baguettes so good? From this article I get that they are a low-gluten bread. But can that be all? I've always suspected a secret variety of wheat.

In all my life and travels I've never had bread nearly as good as the French baguette and I've always wondered why.

seszett 43 minutes ago | parent

French bread is just normal bread, while most other places seem to use the Chorleywood process now, which produces something different.

You can find bread as good as French bread in other places, like some Belgian bakeries but definitely not all of them, or in Vietnam and much of North Africa.

It's really just that much of the Western world seems to have moved to the Chorleywood process because it's cheaper while France has laws to prevent it.

ahf8Aithaex7Nai 21 minutes ago | parent

I don't think that's the only reason. Here in Germany, you can also buy that fluffy white bread—usually wrapped in plastic—that's probably made that way. But most bread in Germany is still produced the traditional way, especially since it's often not pure wheat bread but rather rye bread or mixed-grain bread. Still, a real French baguette is unbeatable. Maybe it's the quality of the flour. But I'm sure it's mainly the very long resting time before baking. In my experience, that's also what makes pizza dough especially soft and flavorful.

idontwantthis 42 minutes ago | parent

I don’t know how common it is in France, but you can ferment a baguette for 3 days and it makes a big difference.

boudin 24 minutes ago | parent

Long fermentation with little sourdough is making a come back in France (e.g the Respectus Panis thing) but I would think it's harder to apply to baguettes for professional bakers looking at how many they churn a day. That would be a lot of proofing bread to store.

_zoltan_ 21 minutes ago | parent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0U8RdRdFDU

do this. thank me later. (yes, it takes multiple days!). as good as when we hop over to France.

riffraff 46 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

I think this is a bit overstating the change: 11% protein (they don't indicate a W factor but it's pretty low) is what I have in my pantry and you can absolutely bake ciabattas with it.

yxhuvud 24 minutes ago | parent

Yes, but when done in industrial (or store) setting they use processes that go faster than what you use at home. Those processes needs the extra protein.

dwedge 39 minutes ago | parent

I'm sure this was a very interesting article but after 7 paragraphs telling me that bread had changed in this one weird way, but not yet telling me how, it started feeling like marketing and I couldn't read more.

I guess I'll never find out why the bread in Europe also has holes.

JimTheMan 32 minutes ago | parent

I agree, what a chore to read.

I resorted to getting chatgpt to make a summary... Which I am loathe to do:

"Chorleywood replaced long fermentation with intensive mechanical mixing, allowing Britain to turn its previously unsuitable low-protein wheat into cheap mass-produced white bread and substantially reduce its reliance on imported Canadian grain."

userbinator 23 minutes ago | parent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process is a more focused article about it.

nobodywillobsrv 18 minutes ago | parent

This is the kind of writing that I assume the people who read the NYT or Atlantic enjoy.

The content is good but yes it's like there is a different class of people that really want to FEEL like they are reading. They are doing THE WORK.

tarkin2 15 minutes ago | parent

I at least appreciate he was up front about advertising his book.

But, yes, after about seven paragraphs I could no longer read on, and I had completely lost any interest in his book.

This should be given as an example how marketing can actively damage your product.

I can't believe how high this is on hackernews. It feels odd.

hyperbolablabla 7 minutes ago | parent

Indeed, what an arduous read.

kazinator 34 minutes ago | parent

I read about the Chorleywood Bread Process in a book out of the library at a time when I was making a bunch of bread: it was the year 1993.

I was quite appalled by what I learned.

The basic idea is that we introduce air into the dough mechanically, which reduces how much time the yeast has to do. It's worked down to the energy: you have to put in so many kWh or joules of work into so many kilograms of dough to get a certain result.

This process is what gives rise (ha ha) to that spongy, tasteless, highly compressible substance that is not recognizable as bread if you're from the other side of the Channel.

The whole idea is to make the largest-looking bread possible using the smallest amount of solid material, in the least amount of time: i.e. not my bread values.

gib444 16 minutes ago | parent

> The whole idea is to make the largest-looking bread possible using the smallest amount of solid material, in the least amount of time

Good old post-WW2 poverty thinking that never went away because profit

boudin 30 minutes ago | parent

This article makes it sound like a good thing, but bread made using the Chorleywood process is considered as ultra-processed food and studies shows that it can contribute to IBS. IMO This invention has been bad for the UK, causing real bread to become an expensive, and hard to find in some places, specialty.

bogdan 12 minutes ago | parent

Brits will pop up like snails in the rain to defend this god awful bread. They'll explain to you for the 15th time that it was a necessity back in the day, or how it's cheaper or faster to make or whatever reason they come up with in the moment. Fellow Brits, we know this, it's ok, it's 2026 the ration times are over. It's time to move on or accept reality.

mweibel 4 minutes ago | parent

yes, long fermentation reduces fodmaps in breads which in turn makes it better digestable (plus it just takes better).

dare944 28 minutes ago | parent

For some reason I read this in James Burke's voice and I could swear I was teleported back to the 80's watching a hitherto unseen episode of Connections.

Interesting stuff.

b800h 11 minutes ago | parent

Great article, but it's not telling the whole story.

Since the Chorleywood Bread Process, British agriculture - selective breeding - has bred strains of wheat which reach high protein levels in the British environment. So the Chorleywood process these days is about using the less-good British wheat for cheap supermarket bread.

"Strong" flour that you can buy in shops is now mostly British as well.