Chorleywood bread making

Greatgimp

Does anybody have a definitive list of breads cooked by the Chorleywood method or rather a list of 'traditionally' cooked bread? I need to avoid it without paying crazy prices, and trial and error is getting disappointing and expensive.

Chorleywood is a fast baking method that uses cheap, inferior yeast and produces that soggy dense bread that most of us are familiar with.

Callie22

I don't think that such a list exists, unfortunately. I would hazard a guess that most packaged sliced bread in this country is made by the Chorleywood process. Most supermarket bakeries tend to either sell bake-off bread that they finish off themselves or make 'fresh' using a scaled down version of the Chorleywood process. It's not the yeast per-se that the issue (yeast is yeast and fresh it's all pretty cheap and much of a muchness), it's more the quantity and the 'improvers' that are also added to give the bread those things that a traditional slow knead and long rise would develop - i.e. flavour and texture. A lot of supermarket bread is more horrible than it used to be as a lot of the salt's been taken out in the name of health. The problem is that you can get away with using just a little salt in traditionally made bread as the slow rise develops flavour. With the Chorleywood process you need the salt otherwise the bread is just bland.

Honestly (and I say this as an ex-baker) you're probably going to struggle to find non-Chorleywood process bread anywhere other than in independent craft bakeries (and even some of those use a scaled-down version of it). If it's the yeast that's causing problems then a traditional sourdough might be better for you (but do be careful as a lot of what's sold as sourdough may still contain manufactured, rather than wild, yeasts). If you've a Waitrose near you then they sell bread from the Bertinet Bakery that is pretty good (and there's usually some reduced at the end of the day ...)

alanq

Home-baking is one sure way of knowing the process by which the bread was produced.