Mainy years ago when we first started looking at wheat we obtained a book from the Library on the varieties of wheat. This was an enormous tome and listed many thousands of different varieties of wheat. Each country seems to have its own varieties and obviously designed to grow better in that particular environment. In England we started importing wheat from Canada during the war from 1940. This was a much nicer wheat, it produced light fluffy bread. This was due to its high gluten and high protient content.
Of course this was only the beginning, seed developers needed more productivity so they cross bred the wheat to increase the size of the ear. This then produced a heavy crop, but of course things do not work out that easy, the stems could not support the large ears and fell over. Again more cross breeding resulted in large ears and thick stems. However, the next issue was mould, because the stems were thick there was less air flow around the stems and mould developed. As you can see the grain we eat as wheat is nothing like what was grown a hundred years ago.
My father was a master baker and worked in a small family business. I grew up in and around the bake house and of course at the weekend and in the holidays it was my job to help. The baker arrived at work at 2am to start the process, weighing the flour, adding the yeast and water. Mixed the dough, in those days they had a machine but when my father started it was all done by hand. This was left to proove for some time, when it had doubled in size pieces were cut off, weighed and thrown into a machine to need and then oil the dough. Once out of the machine it was placed into the tin and then left to raise again before being placed in the oven. The oven was brick lined and several yards deep and wide with a door too keep in the steam from the bread. The first loaves would come out of the oven at 8am, so the whole process took 6 hours. The bread was mainly sold that day, unless it was sliced. The slicer was a series of blades set at the thickness of the slice and cut the whole loaf at once. However, very fresh bread could not be sliced as the bread was still sticky and would clog up the blades. We could get away with selling any spare loaves the next day but any older and it was too hard.
Additives in Bread
In 1941 calcium was added to bread in the UK to prevent rickets. Of the women joining the land army many showed signs of rickets. In 1956 all flour other than wholemeal had to be fortified with minimal amounts of calcium, iron, vitamin B1 (thiamin), and nicotinic acid (or nicotinamide or vitamin B3). Even today these additives are required and need not be included in the list of ingredients for the bread. Then in 1984 a new version of the Bread and Flour Regulations came into effect, limiting the number of permitted additives but allowed ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in wholemeal bread. These regulations were changed in 1989 and again in 1995 and then finally in 1998. These regulations apply to flour made from wheat only
Chorleywood Method
Todays bread is completely different, it has a shelf life of nearly 2 weeks. It is baked in what is known as the Chorleywood method. It was first developed in 1961 but came into general use in 1961. It is estimated that 80% of the UK bread market is produced using this method. The method is basically a conveyor belt through the long oven, and as each end is open they have to add steam to keep the bread moist. This method allows lower protien content wheat to be used. There are a variety of addatives which aid its shelf life. The other difference is the time from the start of the process to the end loaf, which is half the time only 3 hours. To me this implies that the yeasts have less time to digest the sugars and starches, there is only one prooving period in this process.
The difference is in scale, the small family business produced just a few hundred loaves a day and productivity could not be easily ramped up. Modern bake houses probably produce tens or hundreds of thousand of loaves each day. The question is what is this new form of bread doing to our health and our bodies and is this why more people seem to be having an issue with wheat and gluten?