Topic: Loaf Of Bread 'As Salty As Seawater'

[GillE]

According to research reported in the Daily Telegraph, "popular loaves of bread contain as much salt in every slice as a packet of crisps and some are as salty as seawater".

That comes as no surprise to me.  Each loaf I bake weighs roughly 800g and has 10g of salt in it (1.25g salt per 100g bread) and without that minimum amount of salt, yeasts simply won't work!  The people who wrote this report are decrying bread with only a touch more salt than that; clearly they know absolutely nothing about the baking process.  The only way to stop people consuming 'excessive' amounts of salt when they eat bread is to outlaw bread made with yeast altogether.

[Simon]

Having just seen the same article on News 24, I'm pleased to read your post, Gill.  I nearly always get my bread from a high street bakers, and rarely buy supermarket brands, but one of the nicest I've found, is Kingsmill Oatilicious. 

[Rik]

Bread's a chemical process, it needs salt to work, end of ridiculous research.

Prof Graham MacGregor, Cash chairman, said: "It is frankly outrageous that bread still contains so much salt.

"If all manufacturers went beyond these targets and cut the salt in their breads by a half, it would reduce our salt intakes by half a gram per day, which is predicted to prevent over 3,000 deaths from strokes and heart attacks a year."

Idiot.

[Clive]

I only put a small pinch of salt in my bread mix and it rises magnificently.  I did try to reduce it to almost nothing at all but it wasn't very satisfactory, although it still tasted delicious. 

[Rik]

Doesn't the mix already have salt in it, Clive?

[Clive]

It's my own mix of flours, sugar, olivio, seeds, yeast, marvel,salt and water so there shouldn't be a great deal of salt in the ingredients.  But now you have convinced me to check the packets!   . 

[Clive]

The Olivio and Marvel both contain added salt but the flours only have a trace.  I keep the sugar and seeds in plastic containers so I no longer have the packs to check what they say.

[Rik]

Well, the science of bread requires salt, so it's there somewhere.

[GillE]

Out of curiosity, I checked the ingredients on a couple of random loaves in a Tesco today.  Both were 'decent' brands (one was a Warburton IIRC) and both had salt at 1%.  What strikes me is that I need to add a minimum of 1.25% salt for the dough to rise satisfactorily, so how are the commercial bakers doing it?  In fact, commercial bakers use British flour which is low in proteins and gluten and is normally used abroad as a livestock feed.  The bread flour we buy (including that which is milled in the UK) is imported from Canada because the quality of British flour is too poor.  So not only are commercial bakers making their bread using less salt than is required, they are doing it with flour which is too weak to give a good rise.  Oh, and they only prove their bread for 17 minutes.

The more I look into this, the happier I am to bake my own bread.

[Rik]

I know what you mean, Gill, plus there's nothing to beat that smell of bread baking.

[Clive]

I loathe having to buy supermarket bread which I have to on the rare occasions I don't have time to make my own.  It's tasteless and rubbery.  I always use Hovis yeast which never fails to give the bread a good rise. 

[Rik]

We find flour quality varies, Clive, and there's another variable which we've never identified, but which I feel may be caused by variations in chlorine level in the water (having eliminated everything else we can think of).

[GillE]

We find flour quality varies...

It certainly does.  I had this confirmed by the proprietor of Shipton Mill who answered questions at a Dan Lepard workshop I attended earlier this year.  He said the quality of grains vary each year and the skill of the miller is not in milling the grain, but in buying the best combination of grain varieties to produce a consistent, good quality flour.

There are some bakers who use only filtered or spring water but Dan Lepard said he's never noticed any difference and uses whatever tap water is available.

[Rik]

Interesting, Gill. We've certainly found variations between batches of flour, but then we'll get one or two in the middle of a batch which either turn into bricks or tower blocks. We've never really been able to isolate a cause, and given the rest of the ingredients are constant, water was our 'best guess' culprit.

[GillE]

My guess would be your problem is with your yeast, Rik.  I've been using a tin of dried yeast for my bread with a use-by date of 2013 but the last two batches of bread failed to rise properly.   For my most recent bake I used a sachet of dried yeast given to me by Shipton Mill at the Dan Lepard workshop and the result was a superb loaf.

Yeast can also fail when it comes into direct contact with the salt.