We’re celebrating bread week at BigBarn!

Covid and Lockdown has caused a huge increase in home Bread making. And hardly surprising when the supermarket stuff often has nasty additives and is undigestible because it is mass produced far too quickly.

There is nothing better than freshly baked bread made with quality flour and properly, slow, fermented to make it easily digestible and nutritious.

Our food week needs some stats, did you know:
– Mass produced bread from mix to packet takes 45 minutes. Homemade sourdough takes 15-25 hours
– You only need 3 ingredients to make bread: flour, water & yeast
– Bread making relies on the fermentation of the flour with yeast (often found naturally in good flour).
– Fermentation breaks down the complex carbohydrates to make the bread more digestible and causes the bubbles you find in ‘fluffy’ bread.
– Once you know how, 1 loaf of sourdough bread takes about 10 minutes to make and will cost about 20% of the shop price
– Sandwiches account for 50% of bread consumption
– Bread remains one of the UK’s favourite foods, with nearly 12 million loaves sold per day.
– 44% of men eat bread twice a day compared with 25% of women.
– White bread accounts for 76% of the bread sold in the UK.
– Large bakeries, which produce wrapped and sliced bread, account for 80% of UK bread production. (we must fix this!)
– In store bakeries produce about 17% of bread
– Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented the first slice-and-wrap bread machine in 1928. By 1933 80% of all bread sold in the US was sliced and wrapped and the phrase ‘the best thing since sliced bread’ was coined.
– Over 200 different kinds of bread are produced in the UK – from butter rich brioche and crisp baguettes to farmhouse loaves and focaccia.

Unfortunately, bread is symptomatic of a profit focused food industry; cutting costs by ‘streamlining’ and making ‘efficiency savings’, by speeding up processes and using additives and cheap ingredients.

The great news is that bread is very easy, and cheap, to make and there are plenty of recipes or even videos to watch on how to bake bread. You can buy the most important ingredient, flour, in our MarketPlace or enrol on a bread making course.

You could even make a video yourself and add it to our KIS (keep it Simple) Cookery video section to share your recipe with thousands.

We’ll end with a pun though – Why did the loaf of bread get upset? It’s plans kept going a rye!