Colorado Grain Chain "Home School" Lesson 10: Jeremy Cherfas Explains the Chorleywood Bread Process

okay i think we'll get started uh welcome to the colorado grain chains homeschool webinar series uh my name is dan wald vogel i'm the membership coordinator with the rocky mountain farmers union uh thank you for tuning in today uh just a little bit we'll start with uh housekeeping today that the best way to ask a question is to use the q a function it's it should be towards the bottom of your screen just click on the q a and you can type your question in there there is the chat box as well if you need to try to get something expressed to folks on the call but the the best way to to get a question out is through that q a function so please use that um absolutely welcome questions i think that's some of the best way to have some of these discussions uh we are in for a treat today uh we have jeremy cirfus uh joining us as our as our speaker jeremy is a self-described freelance communicator in his bio on his website he lists himself essentially as a translator he speaks science and he speaks english and he works hard to make the two understand each other he is a published journalist including being regularly published in mpr's the salt and he also makes the eat eat this podcast uh which was nominated for a james beard foundation award in 2015 and 2016 so we're definitely in for a treat thank you so much for joining us today jeremy and i'll hand it off to you thanks a lot okay thank you so much dan um well this is so funny i mean this is so strange me sitting in rome which is where i live talking to people some of them in colorado but i guess people elsewhere too um i need to thank andrew calabresi and andy clark i met andrew in edinburgh oh three four years ago now it seems and when he found out that i had family in denver he insisted that i had to meet andy at moxie and we had a terrific visit on a freezing cold day a couple of years ago and uh many thanks also to to to dan val vogel let me tell you a bit more about myself um as as dan mentioned um by training and by inclination i'm a biologist um i like understanding living things and how they operate and how they interact and i'm always learning new stuff but i'm also a journalist um i've worked in print radio tv online and more or less as soon as the internet allowed it i jumped on as a place where i could be my own publisher mostly these days that's my podcast eat this podcast and and bits and bobs of writing here and there so this kind of thing this grain chain lesson home lesson is sort of something i i really enjoy doing um because i can share things i've learned mostly biological things so it's heaven for me so let me let me give you a bit of background and tell you how i um came to bake bread i think i may be possibly the only person in the world who decided to start baking as a rebellion against home baked bread um and it's kind of weird because my mom was a very early i don't want to call her a health nut but she was certainly very into healthy eating we had we had john yodkin books on the shelves we had adele davis books on the shelves and she used to make this this bread um called the grant loaf which was invented in in 1944 more or less by a woman called doris grant to help the brits make the most of their wartime rations and um the grant loaf in my memory um you you got 100 whole wheat flour you added a lot of water warm water and a lot of yeast um you warmed everything up you stirred it into a kind of gloopy mess you poured it into a tin you put it somewhere warm for about 30 to 45 minutes max and then you stuck it in the oven so it was one rise with a lot of yeast 100 wholemeal and it came out more or less like a brick um it um it was very tasty but it wasn't quite what i wanted and my mom being very sensible said you don't like it make your own and so i did i started i started baking i started baking i was a teenager this was the 60s i started using elizabeth david's book of english yeast cook breton yeast cookery um some of you um in the u.s will know bernard clayton's bernie clayton jr's books and i i had that those were my two go-to books um i used to scream at the clayton because all of his measurements were in cups and they made absolutely no sense to me but that was how i learned to be and then um about 20 years later i remember seeing a correction in the paper we used to read which was the independent um i wish i could remember what the what the mistake was but the correction was to a recipe to make your own sourdough starter and i thought and you kind of knew vaguely about sado starters i'd learned about them in in college and what have you um and i thought well if if it was worth correcting it might be worth trying and so i made my first starter and i'm not absolutely sure when that was it must have been the late 1980s because the chuck who wrote the recipe in the independent newspaper lovely lovely man called jeremy round he died in 1989 and um i still have a bit of paper i copied the details onto and when i knew i was going to be talking to you i went i went and found it and looked at it again i'm going to share my screen now um i hope that one that one this one that one so this is i hope uh you i don't expect you to be able to read it but i would actually be happy to share it eventually if if you would like me to but this is this is the um thing i turned i copied out from um the independent onto a bit of notepaper and i did it and it actually if you look at it now it's not how you would prepare a starter these days i don't think but the amazing thing is that it worked and i still have that starter um that starter has traveled around with me an awful lot i it's almost died it's almost it's always been recovered eventually and it's my main starter today so um that's how i got into baking and i'm still baking i bake for friends i make once or twice a week all almost all sourdough um we can talk about that later if you want but um what i want to do now is talk to you about a thing called the trolleywood bread process um which uh is it's how the english get wonder bread um and not just the english but but a lot of countries how we get um uh white soft fluffy bread um i i call this the worst thing since sliced bread um i'd never quite i mean sliced bread is wonderful you know you look at sliced bread um and it is quite astonishing how how it actually happens but the sliced bread is much older than the chorley wood bread process and the american version of uh the bread that gets sliced white stuff fluffy white wonder bread um is a lot older than the chollywood bread process but the chilliwood bread process is a very british solution to a very british problem um the problem it's solving is the same which is how to make bread in very much less time than you need to make what i would call a proper loaf of bread um it starts with two to five minutes of very energetic mixing of the ingredients and those ingredients are flour water yeast and a variety of different things called dough improvers at the very least you've got a hard fat and you've got vitamin c ascorbic acid and immediately after this mixing the dough is divided into bits portions which could be large loaves they could be small rolls anything in between they move on a conveyor belt for about eight minutes and then they get shaped a little fermentation takes place because they got more or less double the yeast in a conventional dough to make up for the reduced time then after shaping the dough will often rest in a tin for up to 45 minutes uh during that it continues to rise it's then baked for about 20 to 25 minutes in a continuous oven before it gets cooled for a couple of hours and the loaves are sliced and wrapped and the whole process takes about three hours from start to finish um three point five three to three and a half a traditional loaf in a traditional high street bakery in england takes about six hours or more and about half of that three hours is the bulk fermentation so what what happened to create the tullywood bread process well in the 1950s chorleywood was a small town on the edge of london it's kind of been swallowed up now and it was the home of the british baking industries research association um this building is where it was it's now an old people's home the bbira was set up with government money and a levy on bakeries so they they paid a percentage of their i think it depended on their their turnover um and it was set up to to carry out generic research um that would be of value to british bakers and going back to that time in the early 1950s bread was produced in hundreds maybe thousands of small bakeries but at the same time in canada westerns had pioneered a factory approach to bread with model bakery factories in toronto and you've got to remember that at this time canada was part of the um british commonwealth so they westerns came to to the uk they brought that set up to the uk and they imported lots of canadian wheat to run their bakeries and the point about canadian week as i'm sure you'll know is that it's it's high protein and it's got a good mix of of the gluten proteins that make the gluten network and um it's so it's it's a stronger flour and with a stronger flour the same amount of flour produces a greater volume of bread so even though it costs some to import wheat from canada western's bakeries could produce cheaper bread than british bakeries and the small bakeries were suffering they turned to the british baking industries research association to help them and they wanted two things first they wanted to speed up the whole process so they could rape bread more quickly which meant more turnover per day and secondly they wanted to be able to use low protein british wheat which you certainly couldn't use in the wonder bread process that had been developed in the u.s um so the bb ira knew about the um process in the u.s um and they tried that but it didn't work on with the british suites as i said um and on the way they stumbled on something because they took small amounts of conventional dough gave it a bit of extra mixing and that enabled them to almost completely do away with bulk fermentation and one of the one of the um books uh kovian and young they were the two of the people who had who more or less developed julie wood um said that they could make um identical bread um identical or superior to conventionally made british british bread okay i don't need to tell you about gluten networks but basically what's going on is that the truly wood bread process is using energy to develop the gluten network now when you need um you're putting energy into the bread um and when you leave time to do the work uh the the energy in the water basically is allowing the gluten network to form but if you if you really smoosh the molecules together by mixing them very very um strenuously then you build the gluten network in almost no time at all so once they discovered that they could get away with that they didn't need to do a bulk fermentation if they um if they did this strenuous mixing um the next thing was to work out in a scientific way well what exactly does it take so they looked at the amount of mixing needed and this is this is i love this this is how they tested the quality of them their procedure this is putting a different amount of work into the dough and baking the loaf and then you just slice through the loaf and trace the outline and the outline that gives you the largest volume is uh the one that is best and they reckoned that the one that the two at the top right were the most um optimum amount of energy putting in more didn't really give you any benefit um you also need to add a fat um to help it rise so here are two fuzzy photographs i'm afraid that i stole out of the book um on the right is the control which is the one with fat um and on the left is the loaf identical production except with no fat and i think i think that the science is that the fat lubricates the gluten network so that in the oven the strands slide over each other so you get more oven spring more rise than you do without the fat but it has to be a hard fat um and you can get a perfectly good spring as you know without it um and then they looked at a whole variety of additives um the one i mentioned already was vitamin c vitamin c ascorbic acid helps the gluten bonds to break and to reform so that as all that energy is going in in the mixing um the gluten bonds are broken by with the help of the ascorbic acid and then they're um uh help to to come together again um in the u.s i think they're still using potassium bromate um as as the main oxidizing agent when they make wonder bread um i might be wrong on that um but that's been banned in in europe for a long time uh there are all sorts of um uh unhelpful side effects of of bromates anyway vitamin c is just one of a whole range of of chemicals called dough improvers and i'm sure you know that even home bakers sometimes crush up a small vitamin c tablet and put it in the dough if they're looking for a bit of a rocket fuel addition to get the dough to rise um lots and lots and lots of other enzymes and other chemicals that industrial bakers use to make the dough more predictable and to make the whole process faster and go improve is a big big business um essentially they they even out any kind of difference between the flower on any from different wheat varieties different meals that sort of thing you can't make industrial bread without them i do find it odd though almost wherever you find websites dedicated to baking improvers you you have hands dusty hands working the flour and that's not something that you ever see in an actual industrial bread factory um the hands never touch the dough ah anyway so let's talk about some of the effects of the truly wood bread process um it was very quickly taken up in the uk um in australia in asia um ex-commonwealth countries not in north america because the wheat there was high protein so it really wasn't needed one of the biggest effects which nobody saw coming was um it actually speeded up the closure of the small bakeries that wanted it in the first place um big bakeries could afford to invest in the machinery that you needed to use the truly wood bread process and the small small bakeries just couldn't compete um there aren't actually very good figures for the decline of small bakeries in the uk there's a thing called the federation of bakers in the uk and they estimate that right now large bakeries are 85 of sales and supermarket in-store bakeries are 12 percent high street bakers by which we may mean kind of small chains independent bakers not in big shopping malls or anything like that they're about three percent and many of them are in any case using versions of the chorley wood bread process and home baking even even after the the uh pandemic resurgence is you can ignore it it's just a rounding error um so although although truly wood didn't save the small breakers it did solve the problem of wheat imports um the amount of wheat that the uk got from canada fell from two and a half million tons in the early 1960s when truly wood came in to um a quarter of a million tons today and it's been estimated that that saved the british economy british bakers about 45 million pounds um so yeah it definitely had an impact um another thing is that people associate the trolleywood bread process with the kind of fluffy sliced loaf actually this is a slightly whole meal slightly seedy loaf you see but you can tweak it to make almost any kind of bread um you you can change the pressure in the mixer you can change the composition of the gas in the mixture and that can give you a fine even crumb like you might want in a sandwich loaf or you can get it to give you a course some open crumb like you might get in a in a baguette and you can adjust the crust too you can have a thin soft crust or a thick and crispy crust and and most of the well i would say almost all of the quote interesting unquote breads you find in the supermarket are made with the chorley wood bread process which brings us to i suppose the heart of the matter which is whether this bread charlie would bread process bread is any good and this is really difficult because what makes a loaf of bread good depends to some extent to a large extent on what you expect i mean if you buy a wrapped slice loaf and you open it up and it has a hard crust you're going to say that's a stale loaf but if you buy a baguette and it has a soft crust you're going to say that that's a stale loaf but judging the quality of a loaf is really very difficult and very personal but two of the scientists scientists behind the cbp um said this they said the advent of the cbp went largely unremarked by the british public and then they say perhaps this was because the introduction of the truly wood bread process to the uk to uk bread left uk bread quality relatively unchanged um they seem to be saying nobody noticed but they also have as i as i mentioned they have a very narrow definition of quality um and here i've pulled out the key for that very long quote i showed right at the beginning they define quality as bread volumes softness and cell structure in other words the crumb and this this chap elton is the boss was the boss of the um british baker industries research association and and he said uh the process gives bread which is better in respect of volume texture color and keeping qualities and is indistinguishable in flavor from bread break from the conventional 3r fermentation process and that that suggests two things to me um probably that british bread might not have been that good before um i don't i really don't know about that um but i some of the people who advocate for the charliewood bread process say that i mean when you when you read criticism they say flavor is reduced in some views and they say detractors of the process have quote no real understanding of the processes by which bread flavor is developed um and i think that's that's kind of disingenuous i don't think you need to know how the flavor is developed to detect the differences i mean the best advice i give anyone who wants more flavor in their bread is to follow elizabeth david's advice in english bread and yeast cookery and use a half or a quarter of the yeast in the recipe and let the dough rise for twice or four times as long and this is the crux of the matter the cbp jolly wood bread process saves time bakers could make much tastier bread using this julia wood bread process but apparently shoppers don't want that um the chollywood bread process has always been about producing a greater volume of bread at the lowest possible cost this is what i found in another book the chorley wood process is chosen by bakeries that decide to make the cheapest possible bread this sort of production does not enhance did not enhance the reputation of the product and i think um that that really gets to it and there's a whole nother question let me stop sharing briefly for a minute um stop sharing where are you okay yeah um there's a whole other question of of why it is that british consumers apparently failed to notice the content of the jollywood bread process um i was i was intrigued to find an essay by paul krugman and nobel prize winning economist about this krugman thinks it's an example of a very rare economic phenomenon which is called a bad equilibrium so in a free market economy a bad equilibrium is one in which people don't demand good things because they've never been supplied before and they're not supplied because not enough people demand them and crookman's talking about british cookery in general and i he's very dismissive and i don't i don't actually agree with him on most british cookery um but as far as bread is concerned maybe i mean he says by the time it became possible for urban britons to eat decently they no longer knew the difference um and there may be something to that it may be that the sort of fondly remembered high street bakery bread of the past um wasn't all that good um so one of the other but one of the possibly beneficial effects of the trolleywood bread process is that unlike me starting to bake because i didn't like the homemade bread i was being offered it seems quite clear that the rise of the chilewood bread process and other industrial bread processes fueled the demand among a very very small clientele for the type of bread we think that it replaced that is to say bread where time rather than energy and hands rather than machines made the bread there are no good figures on the rise of artisan bakers or craft bakers or even micro bakeries with clients in the low two figures but but it's definitely a thing i mean this has definitely happened i do know supermarket sales have declined over the past by about 12 percent over the past five years but i don't know in the uk but i don't know whether people are getting their bread somewhere else or giving up on it entirely um but the other bit of evidence that um speaks to the rise of of artisan bread is [Music] god this is is this um industrial bakers can buy a bag of sourdough flavor um no need to maintain a sourdough starter you've got wheat flour fumaric acid lactic acid malic acid acetic acid all of which are pro all of which are present in sourdoughs um and you get quote sourdough bread um which has resulted in more campaigns certainly in the uk i don't know again i'd be happy to hear from you um about what's happening in the u.s but in the uk um and and australia they call it sauer foe and there's a huge campaign um which is getting nowhere i have to add um about what what you're allowed to call uh whether you're allowed to call this sort of stuff sourdough bread um and just as artisan bread has become more popular with a small segment of the of the audience so too um artisan has become completely meaningless um this is a sandwich i bought in an airport um i don't know if you can see but right down at the bottom under classic cheese it says artisan baked bread well if that's artisan break bread i'm an industrial bread baking machine um you know it's just absurd um so i don't know what you call artisan bread these days if if beamster who made that sandwich can call that artisan baked bread um anyway um let's let's leave that for now and talk a little bit about health i um too many keyboards i don't want to get into health to be honest there are lots and lots of health claims around industrial bread there are health claims around sourdough bread there are health claims around proper craft bread everything else people certainly report all sorts of effects um good effects and bad effects that they experience and i'm not here to deny anyone's experience i would say that there are no what i would call proper trials of the effects of different bread production processes which i think it would be very difficult to do anyway nevertheless that doesn't stop people having strong opinions um i'm happy to talk about those but it's not something i have i have strong opinions about the fact that people have strong opinions that's about as far as it goes i know what i like i know what's good for me so yeah um let me finish up with a couple of things more things about surely would um a lot of people describe truly wood bread wonder bread as trash um i don't agree with that um it it provides an affordable source of calories to millions of people around the world um the tragedy is that by making bread so cheap it has devalued bread as a food my very first trip to america i was a camp counselor in vermont and um i had four delightfully unruly eight-year-old boys to look after and i think it was the second or the third day at lunch one of them spilled the kool-aid and another one of them reached for the wonder bread and mopped it up um and that kind of pained me even then i was 18. so i do think that that's something that that good bakers fight against is this notion that bread needs to be really cheap and so that's a bad side but the good side is that i think it has prompted the rise of of artisan bakeries and i think that that has pushed forward um local grain local bakeries regional grain economies freshly milled flowers all the things that i know you and i think are a good idea um it's been fun over the last three months or so of the lockdown um to watch the the explosion of home bread baking unfolding on social media and i know there are many many future phds to be written on the great covid bread baking um of course i i hope i hope that at least some of these people continue to bake bread once the emergency's over um because in the end and this is totally personal this is my my um motivation baking your own bread is just so much more satisfying in so many more ways than just having good bread um to eat um a couple of things i want to talk about outside of of shorely wood i'm i'm happy to no i think let me finish and then we'll take questions and talk about it um one of them is one one of the things is is what new bakers expect um and i've seen i'm sure you've seen this on on social media in in baking forums where wherever you hang out um because bread has become such an industrial product new bakers seem to want consistency and perfection every time and i'm sure i i don't want to say to them just get over the fact that your bread didn't rise so well this time okay it's under proofed and overbaked it's still edible okay it wasn't instagram worthy it's still edible and nourishing um but i i haven't done much of that because i i i don't think i'm temperamentally suited to do that i think any baker will tell you that you just need to keep working at it and eventually and you work at one or two recipes and eventually they come good um and there have been some kind of stellar recipes that have gone viral which is a very unfortunate term um and people have had trouble with them because they expect it to be the same every time no matter what the temperature of your room no matter what your altitude no matter what your sourdough starter is doing i mean the obsession with getting your starter to float my flower starter sometimes floats sometimes doesn't um you learn you you've got to stick with it um and and i i hope people get into that um but one of the things that's totally destructive is bad instructions um i mean there's one famous famous famous english cook um and and her recipe for bread includes this sentence i haven't made a slide of it she says make a well in the center and pour in all the hand hot water then mix the water into the flour gradually to form a dough the exact amount of water you'll need will depend on the flour well she told us how much water we needed she told us to pour all of it into the middle of the flour um so what's all this about exact amounts of water so anyway i'm i mean this is this is something i get a little bit too aerated about um but i've i've said my piece and the other thing i want to mention is is about the history of wheat and modern wheat breeding and wheat quality um i completely understand why people are so keen on on heritage grains um one of my podcasts a couple of years ago was dedicated to red fife um its origin story how it nearly didn't make it how farmer fife's wife rescued single ear all of that and red fife was basically the making of the canadian prairie wheats and those wheats came south they took over the american wheatlands that fed into the growth of industrial milling in minneapolis and the next thing you know you've got pillsbury and general mills and that's about all um so i do understand the idea that if you want to return to a simpler time you return to older wheats there's a little evidence to suggest that the mineral content of older wheats maybe higher than modern weights but it's complicated by them not being grown in exactly the same conditions and i just want to say that there are some great things happening in conventional wheat breeding um reversing the green revolution the green revolution was all about making the environment fit the wheat so you irrigated you fertilized um you did you killed the weeds modern wheat breeding is much more about um making the wheat fit the environment and it makes a lot more sense these days because you have local grain economies which are growing and they're making use of local graining of local grains um and there's a there's a wheat um on the southeast coast of the united states called appalachian white which um a lot of people think is a heritage wheat i mean if you've got red fife and turkey red and appalachian white oh it's probably an old wheat that was grown in the appalachians it's not it's a modern wheat and a very fine wheat for that environment there's the example of synthetic wheat which has been made using some very interesting laboratory techniques by hybridizing the original three different species that gave rise to bread wheat and that's another terrific breakthrough that will make it possible in future to select for all kinds of characteristics that might have got forgotten or lost in the first domestication of wheat and even better than both of those some breeders are going even further they're allowing the environment to select the wheat that suits it best it's a technique called population breeding um basically you get as many wheat cross wheat varieties as you can you cross everyone with everyone else you create a massively diverse bag of seeds and you plant it um and the ones that like it in that environment thrive and the ones that don't like it don't thrive and slowly but slowly i mean only a couple of years the population evolves to be really well adapted to the environment and because it's diverse the yield is pretty stable from year to year if conditions are changing in a particular direction say getting drier or hotter the population can usually adapt along with it um and that's a really um what's the word it's a really hopeful um approach which is going going really well in in in england and here in italy um and people are beginning to sit up and take notice people are interested in in quality wheats for which they get a better price um and then the final thing i want to talk about is is soft durham wheat durham wheat is really hard it's it's fabulous for all sorts of things but it's a nightmare to mill and with some very advanced laboratory techniques the bread lab in washington state has developed a soft durum we it has all the beneficial qualities of durham wheat but you can mill it in an in an ordinary wheat mill um and i think that's going to be um quite quite a a game changer um looking forward so i mean my final word on that is is yes i think it's important to love cherish honor old wheat varieties but but not to throw the baby out with the bath water i mean there's a lot of good stuff happening in modern wheat breeding um okay that's that's me done i think what's the time oh my gosh i haven't left i haven't left thank you very much um uh i'm i'm ready to hand back how do i hand back to you dan yeah i i think i just pressed this handy reclaim host button okay yeah yeah there we go so yeah as questions come in that's great might um um i see a question from dina and i don't know if it's a question or as much of a statement let's see here it says if affordable source of calories is not a goal might have been the case after world war ii she mentions then nutrition flavor etc should be in place oh it's a statement i see so yeah i think just kind of kind of building on a little bit of what you were saying too there jeremy about nutrition and flavor and and maybe some of these other things that are coming out of all this different types of wheat breeding out there right i i would i would agree absolutely um and and the question is um not just in bread but everything the the pursuit of industrial food is cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and we've lost sight of of what we pay with in terms of health in terms of nutrition so yeah i agree i agree with that so i have a question for you um you know it seems like in europe um europeans tend to spend a little bit more of their percentage for their income on on food than americans do um are you seeing any of those you know regional grain economies developing or you know having a renaissance and around you in rome or in other places in europe do you see that kind of developing even just apart from this this coveted period of home baking but do you see these regional economies developing um much more so in the uk than i'm aware of in in europe continental europe um i know of three maybe four regional grain economies in the uk um scotland the bread is is pioneering that there's one in the southwest of england which is a very very much wetter climate than east anglia there's one in the midlands so i'm aware of those um here it's much less organized it's strange it's very very strange but the i mean like the population breeding there's a there's an ngo is is working mostly with organic and biodynamic farmers to spread the word about the population wheats [Music] but the farmers themselves are not concentrated in any one area so you've got people in sicily you've got people in molise you've got people up in the north of italy growing these wheats and being advised but but it it hasn't really developed to that point yet i mean one thing i find interesting is that it's really hard to get a a ten pound a five kilo bag of flour here i get it by mail order um in the uk a big supermarket will stock a five kilo bag of flour and i guess that's true in the us as well but you don't see that here um home baking people people do home bake and they certainly make pasta but i'm not seeing quite the same level of organization around local grain economies right yeah i know of nowhere to buy wheat berries i mean i no that's not true i can buy 500 grams of a non-specific wheat berry i don't know what it is but but i i can't buy i can't buy five kilos of a known variety in italy without going to a farmer who might let me have some no thank you for the answer you know i know i i grew up in colorado in the 80s and i i think we were a roman meal family it was the bread we ate uh which at least i think rome nail has at least a little bit more bran than maybe wonder bread but uh but it's it's been really exciting to see our you know the small bakeries opening up and more people supporting them and then to see these small bakeries the bakers you know starting to source um more regional grains and and being able to do a little bit more milling in in on-site and things like that so they're because it seemed like growing up you know if there was a small bakery they were accessing a lot of the same wheat that the grocery store would use in their home baked you know in-store bakery and stuff too so it wasn't really wasn't much of a difference and it seems like it really is yeah i think i mean i think there's a different um the bakery just down the street here which is a classic local roman bakery they get a tanker pulls up to the curb and the flower is pumped into their flower bins now their breads are okay it's not great but but the point is you can make good bread with industrial flour i mean you you can you can you can add taste by using a long fermentation and all the rest of it um one of the interesting things and i can't i i know andy was talking about it when i visited moxie is the idea of a baker who is milling also selling flour for to home bakers and i think that's really exciting but i've seen nothing like that here so i'll combine two questions here on on nutrition um one was asking you know can you manipulate nutritional content of bread by how you prepare it and then the second question was just saying you know i heard a rumor that modern wheat is not as nutritious as it used to be just wondering if that's true um yeah i mean modern wheat is not as nutritious in certain regards it i mean it does contain fewer minerals less iron less zinc a few other things um it's not clear how much difference that makes to the diet it i i just don't know um you can add nutrition um because particularly if you take something like whole wheat bread um the br the bran contains these substances that locks up phytates that lock up some of the minerals a longer fermentation destroys some of the phytates which releases the minerals so that's one thing the other thing is that the the organisms in a starter and yeast are um yeast is not just producing carbon dioxide and alcohol it's it's producing all the things we call flavors and that includes some nutritious compounds so definitely in definitely a you can add nutrition by having a longer fermentation and by having um a mixed ferment i mean it's a sourdough great thank you this is a great question uh maybe a simplistic question bonita says in here but i don't think it is um if an ingredient like ascorbic acid helps during the rising process would something such as lemon juice give a bread a softer texture in less aggressive chemically manipulative way that is an interesting question um the ascorbic acid yeah uh i think you're you're better off frankly using a vitamin c tablet um i mean if if that's what you want crush your vitamin c tablet and put a little bit in because the lemon juice is going to affect the ph um of the dough in a much much more than merely its ascorbic acid and that's going to change the fermentation of the yeast but the whole point of the of the sourdough is that it's balancing the lactobacilli which are making things acidic and the yeast and they're feeding each other if you if you use a pure yeast and make it very acidic relatively acidic it it might not work as well okay interesting yeah i guess part of that experimentation well and i should also um introduce andrew calabrese he's uh he's our support staff today as a panelist and making sure if if my internet goes down we we don't all go down with it so andrew um sounds like andrew has a question as well yeah hi jeremy um i have a question about um the scale of bread baking the the cherry wood process clearly served a vital need uh because it enabled the mass production on a scale that was um not did not exist before then um one of the things that we see with artisan bread baking is that there there's an upper limit on on what a small bakery with a small deck oven can do um the bread is wonderful and we all love it and home you know aside from the home bakers who are learning this craft as well which is wonderful uh i was wondering if you had anything you'd like to say about uh your vision your what you see as the future of of um the hot kind of high quality bread that we're seeing this renaissance of today um do you do you think it's something that will continue to grow and is it going to become more affordable as a result i don't want it to become more affordable i really don't andrew i think i think what what needs the change needs to be it needs to become perceived as better value so yes i can buy a white sliced low for 1.99 whatever i don't even know the price of bread in the us at the moment um i know in britain i don't i didn't get this number ready um a huge amount of bread is thrown away because it's perceived as cheap um when you pay i mean when you pay i 10 euros for a half a loaf from poilan um you don't throw that away you savor it you eat it it's much more nutritious you don't eat nearly as much so i don't want to see bread become artisan bread become cheaper i want it to become better valued by the people who buy it it's the same it's my same spiel about meat i don't want to see organic meat competing on or extensive meat competing on price i want people to eat half as much meat and pay twice as much for it um so for me the future of i mean my dream world my dream world is sort of like a hub and spokes so my dream world is a bakery like say moxie or in london e5 that invests in a mill that invests in local farmers that creates supply chains for the mill and that either that is attached to a bakery or it is independent of bakeries and that mill which can i easily easily do 500 kilos a day um even a small mill um supplies network of smaller bakeries who sell out every day maybe even by order i mean i think this subscription bread model is terrific um you know i think it it it partly depends it's part of the problem i don't know how it is in colorado but part of the problem is you can't just sell bread out of your kitchen um but i mean i make i well now now because i can't travel to the office where i used to work but i last in in january i was baking 12 15 loaves a week no big deal but 12 to 15 people were paying me a little bit of money and getting my bread um i i see no reason why a person couldn't bake for their neighbors i see no reason why a group of two or three people couldn't make for a street or three or four streets and depends partly on how your city works whether people can come and get it whether they but there are these models of cottage bakeries that have got a little bit bigger they work they work well the problem is sourcing the flour so my dream world is a small mill in a central location so supplying flour to a bunch of bakers at a variety of scales from a loaf a week to 100 loaves a week yeah and kim was mentioning in the in the chat box and yeah that she's absolutely correct that in colorado we do have some cottage food licensing um that's allowed so it's mostly based on um taking a class to make sure you understand some health and safety measures and then it's it's uh there's certain levels of you know gross income you can bring in from that but but it's been neat to see some of that cottage food come on and now it's changing to allow not only bread and baked goods but you know fermented products and and other cottage food um items so that's neat to need to see and speaking of just sourcing things uh luigi was asking we know here in in boulder area you know we can get a lot of great stuff from moxie but he was asking you know what's the best place to find seeds of heritage varieties i don't know if that's a question more about um sourcing seeds for for farming or if it's uh you know wheat berries or or maybe either if you know of any other sources on the on the good ol world wide web that you recommend um no i have i have to say no i don't um um i mean the joy of seeds is that if you want to grow them and you and you have time you know you don't need more than a handful it'll take you time but you you can end up with several acres worth um for for for grinding your own i i i just don't know um but there are they are out there on the web the cost of transport is high they're heavy that's why they travel in rail cars well i guess i guess we got time for one more question if that's all right with you jeremy uh yeah yeah yeah i know you you said you didn't want to get too much into you know that the effects of health and wellness on consumers you know when it comes to different kinds of bread but just a question here um from dina saying you know as a scientist what is your advice for the process of correlating science or sciences to the explosion of gluten sensitivities and just following the the new market of gluten-free baking um you know is it is it not as nutritious what in a in a i know this is a huge huge question so in a short answer kind of what do you what are your thoughts kind of on that whole proliferation of sensitivities but then also this whole new market of gluten-free products yeah well who's benefiting from the who's benefiting from this market of gluten-free products um a lot of people self-identify if spending twice as much for a product makes you feel better who am i to argue i spend twice as much on good bread um or good meat so i think look for sure there is there are celiacs for sure there are people with crohn's disease no doubt in my mind a lot of the rest of it and by it i mean gluten sensitivity wheat belly um all these things i don't suffer from them i so it's i'm deeply cynical and deeply cynical about about it but i don't want to stop anybody having the opportunity to say i'm gluten free and i want products that seem to be like gluten containing products because that's the other issue i mean is bread are not bread muffins waffles do they it's so complex it's so tied up in what you think you ought quote unquote to be eating i mean if i wanted a uh if i wanted something that didn't contain gluten um on which to spread um jam or to eat with a bit of cheese i'm not sure i'd want gluten-free bread i think there are other options you could you know you could have a dosa um you could have a rice pancake you could have a some of those styrofoam rice things you could have corn chips you know um i get very this is purely personal i don't want to knock anybody's choices um i don't want to say you shouldn't be choosing these things but i wouldn't be that's all i can say yeah no i think that's a that's a delicate answer and i think what you really what's really highlight there is just you know our power of choice and the value of the consumer dollar to support food systems that you believe in and and i guess that's a good transition back to the colorado grain chain folks yeah they can sign on to coloradograinchain.com and become members if they choose but that's you know supporting uh amazing bakers like andy over at moxie and others but also that full system to be able to continue creating these opportunities all the way all the way back to the farmer who's producing it and um and supporting those rural communities as well where a lot of this grain comes from so i'll invite people there folks can also find this recording and others there are links on the colorado grain chain website uh to take you to youtube and watch these other recordings um and then also if you become a member there's there's a bunch of forbidden knowledge on that website of recipes and and other tips and other resources for info so i welcome anybody for that but uh thank you so much for joining us today jeremy we really appreciate your time yeah fantastic especially instantly being uh eight eight time zones away we really appreciate your flexibility yeah it's it's it's only it's only eight o'clock here time i mean you know we we eat late here um thank you very much thank you to everybody who took part thank you for some great questions and um well if any of you want more information from me um i'm happy for dan or andrew to share my email not a problem well thank you so much for that we really appreciate it take care we're ready take care everyone have a great one bye