In Praise of Bread

Bread is pretty taboo in dieting circles.

You can’t have bread on the Atkins diet. You can’t really have bread on the low GI diet, although some breads are less bad for you than others. You can have bread on the Weight Watchers Points Plan, because you can have anything you like on that plan, but two slices of shop-bought bread are at least 3 points, which is quite a lot if you’re on 18 points a day, which fortunately I never was because I would have wasted away. However, if you are following Weight Watchers Core, you have to use some of your weekly Points for bread, even though you could substitute it for unlimited brown rice or oats or Ryvita or any number of other grain-based products that you wouldn’t have to Point at all.

That doesn’t make sense. Does that make sense? I don’t think that makes sense.

Poor, neglected bread. Everyone seems to hate it. If they aren’t counting carbs, they’ve got an allergy; if they haven’t got an allergy they’ve got an intolerance. You’d think the bread basket was full of poison, the way people recoil from it as it passes them.

Until recently, I never ate bread; it was a leftover from my hazy, hallucinogenic days on the Atkins diet, of which more later. The reason was that I didn’t really like it very much. What I didn’t like about it was:

(a) It didn’t really taste of anything. Wholemeal was better than white, but both were pretty bland; and

(b) It didn’t really seem to have much in it. Even the posh baked-in-store stoneground multigrain seeded loaves only ever seemed to contain one lonely little pumpkin seed, cowering miserably in a sea of unadulterated flour. And even the most robust, sturdy, authentically crusty rustic loaf disintegrated upon toasting, especially if you buttered it whilst it was still hot.

All in all, I’d eat two slices of toast, and for ten seconds I’d feel deliciously full. And then suddenly - *pop* - and I was starving again, and battling the urge to just toast, butter and devour every slice in the bag.

It was like crack, except, well, no, okay. I’m not sufficiently thick to think that toast is anything like crack. Sorry, crack addicts, for trivialising your situation. I won’t do it again. Jesus, it was just a figure of speech. Whatever. Anyway, what I mean is that I realised that I couldn’t eat bread without either immediately eating too much bread, or eating too much of something else later because I was still hungry. And not because it was particularly nice to eat, either. So I stopped eating it at all.

Funnily enough, much though I love baking, I’ve never baked my own bread. It looks like too much effort and I’d always filed it under “things that are not sufficiently more nice when made at home to justify the effort of making them”. So I didn’t discover the difference between home made bread and shop bread until I got a bread maker, just after Christmas. Yes, it’s a Russell Hobbs Bread Man, actually, and it is Miraculous. What you do, right, is you put your ingredients in, just sort of on top of each other in the tin, and then you put the tin in the breadmaker and you programme it and the next morning you wake up with the scent of fresh bread wafting deliciously past you.

And it’s amazing. The bread is amazing. I don’t think it’s quite as good as hand-kneaded bread, probably, but it is a real revelation after Tesco’s Value White Bread. It is delicious and crusty and warm. It is robust enough to withstand the most immediate post-toasting buttering. And - it feeds you. Especially if you add oatmeal or seeds or fruit or wholegrain flour. One slice of bread from the breadmaker for breakfast, with a low-fat natural yogurt and a couple of pieces of fruit, keeps me going until lunchtime. Two slices left me uncomfortably stuffed.

Now, I’m sure that there are at least a couple of people out there thinking “Well actually Katy one slice of shop bought bread leaves ME feeling stuffed to the HILT actually and that’s WITHOUT butter, you great big porketeer” and to those people I say, through gritted teeth, that I am VERY FUCKING HAPPY FOR YOU. Seriously. I wish you nothing but good things and certainly no bad things. Really. But for me the bread maker was a revelation. It was, in fact, the colossal difference between the bread from the breadmaker and the bread from shops that got me thinking about the quality of home made food versus ready-prepared food, and whether I should start cooking more from scratch and worrying less about how much I ate. It made me realise that if the food you eat is really, really good and full of good things, you don’t need to eat as much of it.

And now I give you a recipe.

This is the bread that I most often make in the breadmaker - it is a recipe that came with the breadmaker, although it is readily tweakable: pumpkin, linseed and flax seeds, maybe, or strong wholemeal flour instead of the strong white bread flour that the recipe calls for - yes, it is a white bread recipe. I don’t usually like white bread, as I said somewhere up there, but the oatmeal and mixed seeds make it a good, solid bread that actually sticks to your ribs. If you want to make it even more substantial, you could substitute strong wholemeal bread flour for the white flour and use the wholemeal programme instead.

I wouldn’t begin to know how to make it without a breadmaker, I’m afraid, but I assume that the ingredients would be the same and you’d just have to do kneading by hand and stuff. (That’s some pretty useful advice that I just gave you there, isn’t it? I can’t believe no one’s offered me my own cookery programme.) If you do have a breadmaker, just remember to add all of the ingredients in the right order and (if you’re setting the timer) not to let the yeast get near the salt or the wet ingredients, as either will cause it to start doing its yeasty thing too early.

Seeded White Loaf - makes approximately a 1.5lb loaf

Ingredients: 260ml tepid water (I use 100ml boiling water and then add cold water to 260ml); 1 tablespoon light olive oil or other vegetable oil; 1 teaspoon salt; 1.5 teaspoons sugar; 75g oatmeal; 380g strong white bread flour; 1 tablespoon poppy seeds; 1 tablespoon sunflower seeds; 1 tablespoon sesame seeds; 1 sachet of fast-acting dry yeast.

Directions: Add the ingredients in the order listed above (I usually spend quite a bit of time scattering the oatmeal and flour over the wet ingredients to form a sort of seal between the wet ingredients and salt and the yeast). Set the breadmaker according to the manufacturer’s instructions - I set mine for a 1.5lb loaf with a dark crust and I use the white programme, unless of course I’m using wholemeal flour in which case I would use the wholemeal programme.

In the BreadMan this recipe takes about four hours, and I usually set it to bake overnight so that I wake up to fresh bread in the morning. The bread is good untoasted for at least 2 days.

I wouldn’t begin to know what the Points or calories per slice are, although I’m sure it would be possible to build the recipe on the Weight Watchers site or through a calorie counting site. What I do know that there is nothing in this bread that is not good for you, and that one slice goes considerably further than two slices of Kingsmill Gold.