Well, the point of including this, other than to share an easy and delicious recipe is to bring up the subject of why shop-bought bread is so awful. There it sits on the supermarket shelves, a tribute to good looks and no content, they get full marks for presentation, but you get it home and cut a piece anticipating breathing in that beautiful fresh bread smell to get nothing, but a sour uninviting disappointment. This is all thanks to the Chorley Wood Process. Don't you find it interesting that that 'Taste the Difference' types with a hefty price premium don't have ingredients listed? Thanks to some studies in Chorleywood in the 60s, it was discovered that including a quantity of soya in bread made it whiter, easier to manage, better for assisting cheap, poor quality wheat, and great for speeding up the process of making bread. The downside being soya in bread tastes pretty foul, so it was recommended that only a certain percentage was used, along with ascorbic acid and suddenly the production costs went down dramatically. How long will it be before supermarkets realise that the reason that bread-makers are so popular is we don't like their bread.
A last note on this subject. I remember recently on the BBC news website seeing a photo of someone making bread in Afghanistan, with the caption, he was choosing his flour according to what gave the best flavoured bread, as though this was a novel concept! We've lost something haven't we?
