The Polish Bakery - disappeared? 17 March at 5:26PM in Food shopping & groceries 14 replies 1.5K views

Stompa

Sarahspangles said:

Most appealing are the sliced sourdough loaves, though they're rather expensive and appear to have very few slices per pack.

Well if you’re up for experimenting have you tried making your own?  We bought a bread machine three weeks before the first lockdown.  We switched over to using sourdough almost immediately, because dried yeast supplies ran low.  I actually used some of the Polish Bakery loaves that we used to buy as inspiration for recipes. 

We never buy loaves now, or yeast.  I occasionally make a sourdough boule (hand finished, oven baked) but mostly loaves are baked in the machine’s bread pan.  There’s a lot of ‘mystique’ about sourdough but we maintain a small rye starter (30 to 60g) that lives in a jam jar in the fridge and gets fed a few hours before baking a couple of times a week.  It replaces all the yeast and some of the water/flour in whatever recipe we use, and we keep back and feed 10 to 20g ‘scrapings’ for next time.  To use a bread machine, you select a dough programme and simply let the dough sit in it until it’s risen enough to hit bake.  

At £160 for the machine and 50 to 80p for 500g flour to make an 800g loaf I’m sure we broke even some time ago.

Thanks. Yes I had considered that option, though as the only person in the house who eats bread (and only a slice or two a day), I'd ruled it out as unviable. I'm sure I read somewhere that home baked bread doesn't freeze well, I don't know if that's really the case?

Sarahspangles

Thanks. Yes I had considered that option, though as the only person in the house who eats bread (and only a slice or two a day), I'd ruled it out as unviable. I'm sure I read somewhere that home baked bread doesn't freeze well, I don't know if that's really the case?

We freeze bread all the time, and it’s lovely toasted.  The additives that commercial bakeries use may extend the life of bread but I don’t think they give it any special performance frozen.  ‘Proper’ sourdough and our own homemade needs eating within 72 hours.  Rye sourdough maybe a little longer.  So if I’m cutting back and it’s just OH eating it we might slice half a loaf and freeze it after 36 hours.  Fresh bread needs to cool before slicing, and it’s slightly firmer about 24 hours after baking when you can get nice thin slices.

The reference to ‘proper’ sourdough is because some supermarket ‘sourfaux’ is made with inactivated powdered sourdough starter for flavour, but then raised with yeast.

I sound like a right bread snob, but for me if I now went back to buying bread ready-made it would have to be the really expensive hand-finished stuff, so there is no way back!

If you do fancy trying your own, I can recommend the Bake with Jack website, he’s perfected low-waste home baking.

Stompa

Sarahspangles said:

Thanks. Yes I had considered that option, though as the only person in the house who eats bread (and only a slice or two a day), I'd ruled it out as unviable. I'm sure I read somewhere that home baked bread doesn't freeze well, I don't know if that's really the case?

We freeze bread all the time, and it’s lovely toasted.  The additives that commercial bakeries use may extend the life of bread but I don’t think they give it any special performance frozen.  ‘Proper’ sourdough and our own homemade needs eating within 72 hours.  Rye sourdough maybe a little longer.  So if I’m cutting back and it’s just OH eating it we might slice half a loaf and freeze it after 36 hours.  Fresh bread needs to cool before slicing, and it’s slightly firmer about 24 hours after baking when you can get nice thin slices.

The reference to ‘proper’ sourdough is because some supermarket ‘sourfaux’ is made with inactivated powdered sourdough starter for flavour, but then raised with yeast.

I sound like a right bread snob, but for me if I now went back to buying bread ready-made it would have to be the really expensive hand-finished stuff, so there is no way back!

If you do fancy trying your own, I can recommend the Bake with Jack website, he’s perfected low-waste home baking.

Thanks for that, if I can't find a suitable Polish Bakery equivalent I may need to reconsider getting a breadmaker.

Mnoee

Stompa said:

Sarahspangles said:

Most appealing are the sliced sourdough loaves, though they're rather expensive and appear to have very few slices per pack.

Well if you’re up for experimenting have you tried making your own?  We bought a bread machine three weeks before the first lockdown.  We switched over to using sourdough almost immediately, because dried yeast supplies ran low.  I actually used some of the Polish Bakery loaves that we used to buy as inspiration for recipes. 

We never buy loaves now, or yeast.  I occasionally make a sourdough boule (hand finished, oven baked) but mostly loaves are baked in the machine’s bread pan.  There’s a lot of ‘mystique’ about sourdough but we maintain a small rye starter (30 to 60g) that lives in a jam jar in the fridge and gets fed a few hours before baking a couple of times a week.  It replaces all the yeast and some of the water/flour in whatever recipe we use, and we keep back and feed 10 to 20g ‘scrapings’ for next time.  To use a bread machine, you select a dough programme and simply let the dough sit in it until it’s risen enough to hit bake.  

At £160 for the machine and 50 to 80p for 500g flour to make an 800g loaf I’m sure we broke even some time ago.

Thanks. Yes I had considered that option, though as the only person in the house who eats bread (and only a slice or two a day), I'd ruled it out as unviable. I'm sure I read somewhere that home baked bread doesn't freeze well, I don't know if that's really the case?

One trick to lengthen the shelf life of homemade bread is to scald some of the flour. https://www.chainbaker.com/scalding/ this site explains it well, but you can Google and find plenty more explanations and methods - the rolls I make don't last too long in our house so I can't personally attest to that property, but it does also make beautifully soft bread, so I continue to do it!