All hail Adolf Ignaz Mautner von Markhof. And also Pope Leo IX, Michael Cerularius the Patriarch and assorted wise rabbis and scholars.
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If you bake bread only occasionally, you’re probably just grateful to 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 of our cultures.
Photo from Why Unleavened Bread?
There’s a fundamental tension between the time it takes to make a loaf of bread and the value of the final product.
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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 in so many ways.
Perhaps there’s more to flour fermentation than the bubbles that lighten the loaf.
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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 business as a loaf of bread became cheaper and cheaper. Was it worth it? You tell me.
Photo of Beaumont House, former HQ of the British Baking Industries Research Association, where the Chorleywood Bread Process was invented, by Diamond Geezer. It is now a care home.
A small bakery in Toronto, Canada, became a behemoth that bestrides global bread and beyond. Phew!
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Size brings benefits to bakeries as much as to flour mills. The episode tells a small part of the story of how George Weston turned a bakery route in Toronto into one of the biggest food companies in the world, responsible for more brands of bread than you can imagine. And not just the bread, but many of the ingredients that make megabakeries possible.
St Anthony Falls powered the sawmills that created the financial capital that laid the foundations for General Mills.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:34 — 6.2MB)
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Stone mills served us well in the business of turning grain into flour for thousands of years, but they couldn’t keep up with either population growth or new and better wheat. The roller mill came about through a succession of small inventions and the deep pockets of a few visionary entrepreneurs. They turned Minneapolis into the flour capital of the world.
In case you think my account was oversimplified …
Diagram from Wheat Foods Council.
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