"It is indeed true to say that the Chorleywood Bread Process revolutionised the bread making industry, as in 2009, it was determined that approximately 80% of all the bread made in Britain, Australia, New Zealand and India, used the process. In addition, the CBD has been adopted in more than 30 other countries across the globe."
Only 80%? I'm in the UK now and it seems all but impossible to buy bread not made this way. It's as though bread here is made for people without teeth.
We must live in different parts of the UK then because where I am in the north the bread choice has never been better - what you said was more true a couple of decades ago but my local small co-op has a huge range of bread fresh baked on premises including stuff like ancient grain sourdough.
All the lidl's within 20 miles have in store bakeries and do the same and you can order that stuff from all the major supermarkets.
It's funny that you mention co-op and lidl.. neither of them actually have "bread fresh baked on premises including stuff like ancient grain sourdough" [0].
kwhitefoot is correct and the vast majority of bread in the UK is not what you think it is.
The bread in these two stores is mostly baked in a factory and then delivered to the store where it may be heated for a golden crust (at most). The ancient grain sourdough is (likely) just mostly wheat bread [1].
In my personal experience, I was always suspicious of the "fresh sourdough bread" at Tesco. It was far too soft to be real sourdough bread and now I think it was a straight-up lie- sorry just a marketing label.
This is just premixed and shaped dough brought into stores and then cooked there surely. There's no guy at the back of your co-op carefully nurturing his bread-mother.
Have you tried somewhere else than a supermarket or franchise bakeries?
I have to say though it isn't easy. It's hard to find good bread in the UK. I had a salmon sandwich on a good wholmeal sourdough at a shop in the Canary Wharf tube station in 2015 and I still remember it.
The only way I've found to have a decent loaf of bread in the UK is to make it myself. I kinda recommend it. I don't really care about breadmaking, like I'm not seriously into it, but the bread I make at home is just decent bread and it's tough to find that in the shops.
And don't buy flour from the supermarket, either. I once tried the wholewheal flour from the Waitrose, after I got fed up with their wholemeal loaf tasting like cardboard. Well, the bread I made with their flour tasted exactly the same as their bread. There's something wrong not only with breadmaking, but also with flour sold in this country. But you can get good bread flour (hard white, wholemeal, spelt, rye, barley, anything you want) if you look around online a bit.
It's not hard to find good bread in the South of UK but you generally are not going to get it in a supermarket and need to know your local area. I live within walking distance of at least 2 independent bakeries and 2 chains[1] that make good bread and for the last 30 years of living in the UK the only times I have had difficulty getting decent bread have been in the North or in Wales. For calibration I am an absolute bread snob having baked my own sourdough for years (although I haven't for a while). I even did a Dan Lepard[3] masterclass once.
For flour the best places to get good flour are either online[2] or in expensive healthfood shops. The one near me that does good flour is where all the local yoga mums buy their candles and whatnot but they do great bacheldre spelt flour for example. But Dove's Farm flour for example is generally pretty good and easy to come by even in supermarkets if you go to a waitrose for example.
[1] Gails and Ole and Steen. If you're a serious snob you can criticise both because the dough isn't made on the premises, it's made centrally and then just baked in the shop but it's still good bread.
[3] https://www.danlepard.com/ He's one of the top sourdough bakers in the world, to the extent that Michellin starred-restaurants have been known to get him in as a consultant to come up with the breads to go alongside the rest of their menus.
Chorley wood bread makes *terrific* toast. This explains its popularity in Blighty.
> I'm in the UK now and it seems all but impossible to buy bread not made this way.
Utter rubbish! 30 years ago maybe, but these days even small corner shops (let alone large supermarkets) will offer quality fresh breads from a local bakery.
I'm in the UK and would prefer to buy non-Chorleywood bread, but my local corner shops only sell what looks like versions of the regular supermarket stuff, and the only genuinely artisan bakery is a distance away. Our local (medium sized) supermarket has the "bakery" section of unwrapped and traditional looking bread - but they are "baked in store", and I've no idea of the process that's used to produce the incoming dough. I suspect no real baker is involved.
In Australia "baked in store" actually meant baked in Ireland, frozen, shipped to the other side of the would, and warmed-up/finished-off in an oven at the supermarket!
There are a lot of types of bread. For a whole bunch of those this process is irrelevant. Pita for example. So a specialist "foreign foods" place will have lots of options. But also if you have either an actual bakery or a large supermarket they will have options to make "traditional" English bread by the conventional more expensive process and charge you for that.
If you want to pay 40p for a loaf of bread, Chorleywood is the way that happens. If you don't mind paying £2.50 for an artisan loaf that you can't figure out how to slice that's cool too.
Dippy soldiers probably don't benefit from using the slow expensive process. A ham sandwich probably does.
>If you want to pay 40p for a loaf of bread, Chorleywood is the way that happens. If you don't mind paying £2.50 for an artisan loaf that you can't figure out how to slice that's cool too.
And where is the magical 1GBP loaf that is done on mass scale, but is properly fermented? It's not as if in other parts of the world is not full of that type of bread.
Even the supermarkets should have quite a bit in their 'fresh' section that's made more normally. Particularly look for sourdough - even if it's not real sourdough you should find stuff that's had a decent amount of time to rise.
Beyond that - visit a bakers or a market or something.
It's certainly not real sourdough, but where it has been given time to rise more naturally it will often say so, and that implies it is not a product of the chorleywood process. Could be wrong though!
But yes, I'm not surprised the supermarkets skirt as close as they can to the law and mislabel with wanton abandon.
Only 80%? I'm in the UK now and it seems all but impossible to buy bread not made this way. It's as though bread here is made for people without teeth.