Monochrome image of a baker putting loaf tins into an oven. The baker wears a pristine white chef's hat and is leaning forward on the right. The oven door on the left is open to receive the tins, which are lined up on a wooden peel.

The fight between brown and white, good for you versus good for us, has been going on for a long time. Brown flour certainly ought to be more nutritious, and these days, even the elites are choosing brown bread over white. Maybe that’s why sales of “whole grain bread” have more than tripled in t...

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Artwork from a cereal packet of Organic Kamut Flakes with raisins, showing a supposed Egyptian person holding a bowl of breakfast cereal

Sourdough — whatever you call it — is the original leavening agent for breads around the world. At its simplest it is just a piece of the last batch of dough, set aside to ferment the current batch. But it can be so much more than that, a stable little ecosystem of species that support one another...

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Orthdox Jews baking unleavened bread, matzo, in a wood-fired oven. On the left a man in a long frock coat wearing a white skullcap is manipulating the long aluminium handle of a peel for managing the breads in the oven. On the right a younger man wearing a white plastic disposable apron looks on.

If you bake bread only occasionally, you’re probably just grateful for little packets of dried yeast. This episode is not about that. There’s just not that much to say.

When it comes to Judeo-Christian religious doctrine, however, the role of yeast in human affairs bubbles away below the surface...

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Two hands kneading a ball of dough shot with a slow shutter speed so that the hands and dough are blurred

Flour, water, salt and yeast; the basic ingredients of a loaf of bread. What happens when you mix them up and then heat them is a complex casade of chemistry, biology and physics. Most of the more subtle changes take time and can’t really be rushed. That’s why slow bread is better than fast bread...

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A rather grand Victorian-style villa with double bays, set behind a green lawn and shrubs. This is Beaumont House, former HQ of the British Baking Industries Research Association, where the Chorleywood Bread Process was invented. It is now a care home.

Small bakers couldn’t compete with the giants created by Allied Bakeries, so they turned to science. That produced the Chorleywood bread process, which gave them a quicker, cheaper loaf. Unfortunately, the giant bakeries gobbled up the new method too. More and more small bakeries went out of busin...

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