This is a subject very close to writers’ hearts, as most days we dine ‘al desko’.
When is a bakery not a bakery? When it’s little more than ‘a tanning salon for baguettes’, according to the Real Bread Campaign. Just how much bread is made elsewhere is revealed today in a ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) against Tesco. It judged that Britain’s biggest supermarket was wrong to suggest its bread was baked from scratch, when most of its stores had done little more than pop near-finished loaves into the oven.
In an advertising campaign in the national press, Tesco celebrated the freshness of its in-store bread. The headline text read: “Fresh bread. Baked from scratch in our in-store bakery. Using 100 per cent British flour. So every single loaf is genuinely British… Born and bread.” The small print stated: “Subject to availability. Selected UK stores.”
Tesco told the ASA only a few hundred of its larger stores made their own loaves, while the majority used part-baked bread made elsewhere. These loaves are chilled or frozen before being re-baked or finished on the premises. Only 504 of Tesco’s 2,362 UK stores baked their bread from scratch – while the overwhelming number of its “in-store bakeries”, 1,288, engaged in re-heating, the ASA discovered. But that’s not what it says in its ads.
The food writer and supermarket critic Joanna Blythman described this as “nothing but bogus retail theatre”. This follows news from France that home bakeries are in rapid decline as supermarkets take over in the one stop shopping stakes. In a time-poor economy it’s tough to try and buy from scratch, and nigh-impossible in the inner city.
Funny how the same thing in everybody’s mouth at the moment. I read yesterday that bakers in Germany are taking ALDI to court over the exact same thing.
For myself as a German, bread is a subject close to my heart and I have taken to baking my own. Problem is, it’s so damn tasty it’s gone before it’s cooled properly.
As for inner city London and good fresh bread, there are a few places where one can purchase one or twenty. Apart from the German Supermarket near City Road, there are the Euphorium Bakeries in Islington as well as an Italian place on Wardour Street that has the most delicious windough displays.
Apologies for the cheap puns.
One of benefits (this, and the view) of living in a small northern village is that we have a bakery. So bread is local, fresh, baked and cheaper than in a supermarket. If you want swappsies mind we’ll have to talk museums as well. Ours is to do with pencils, and even that is over the fells.
Plumbago and graphite, I assume. The cedar that made the pencils smell so lovely were North American?
I bought a loaf of rye bread for canapes once, didn’t use it and left it in the bread box. I left it for two years before I threw it out and it was still in exactly the same state as when I bought it. The started putting ‘best before’ dates on them after that.
I worked in a bakery during university. People came up from the wharf first thing in the morning with the smell of hot bread in the air and asked, “Is it fresh?” one morning the baker heard the question as he was emptying the oven. He bounced two loaves on his fingers to the counter, wrapped them, tore the paper so the bread could steam out, and asked, “Fresh enough?”
Peter – I fully understand about making your own bread.
I find that making two loaves when I only need one is a solution. That way one can break out the butter and scarf one loaf down straight from the oven and still have enough left for the evening toast.
And – no – I’m not fat. I should be, but I’m not.
My baker-employer said that eating hot bread would ruin your stomach. We didn’t care and had cold milk and buns straight from the oven slathered with butter for our break. That is a delicious memory.
No, it was the buns that were slathered with butter, not the oven. (Proof read BEFORE hitting send!)