Yep. I went out to the garden and came back with these.

In January. I mean, this is England, for heaven’s sake – which last time I checked was in the northern hemisphere!

This is one crazy winter.

My husband and I have made a decision*. We are no longer going to buy Chorleywood bread if we can help it.

Why? And what is Chorleywood bread anyway? Well, that’s a picture of it up there, and apparently, 80% of our bread is made by the Chorleywood method these days. If you go and read this, you’ll probably get the answers to your questions, and if not, you can ask in the comments section. Pay attention to the recipe for Scottish Morning Rolls and in particular to the complete absence of additives and the length of the fermentation process. This is how bread used to be, and still should be, made.

Perhaps I should also add that some people think that the decline of traditional breadmaking plus the upsurge of Chorleywood bread is behind the increase in various health problems including yeast intolerance.

So, to get back to my story, when I needed to pop into our local supermarket today to pick up a few things, I went to the bakery section and started to look for traditionally baked loaves.

I found English bloomers and crusty farmhouse loaves. I found Italian, Polish and German loaves. I found ‘Mediterranean’ breads, sunflower breads, poppy-seeded breads, multi-grain, malted, and granary breads. I found a loaf of French ‘pain de campagne’ which looked and felt marginally better than all the other sponge-like loaves, but it was as light as air and I didn’t think a French countryman would have recognised it.

I picked it up, somewhat disconsolately .. and then I saw a baker lurking behind the shelves so I accosted him.

Me: ‘Excuse me … ?’

Baker: ‘Yes, can I help you?’

Me: ‘Thank you, yes. Do you have any traditionally baked, long fermentation loaves?’

Baker: ‘Huh?’

Me: ‘Do you have any traditionally baked bread, with a long fermentation?’

Baker: ‘Fermentation … I don’t recognise that word. What do you mean?’

Me: ‘You know, you have to leave the dough to rise, to let the yeast work?’

‘Baker’: ‘Oh, ah, yes. Mm. No. But we’re going to start doing that next week!’

Me: ‘Oh good. Something to look forward to, then!’

‘Baker’: ‘Yes – it’ll be good. We’re going to let the dough rise for two hours, then .. ‘

Me: ‘Two hours?? Oh, I was thinking longer. I’ve been buying loaves with an eight, or even twelve hour fermentation.’

‘Baker’: ‘Oh yeah, they used to do that, didn’t they? Leave it in a box with straw in it overnight, then knock it back the next morning.’**

Me (deciding I was onto a loser with this one): ‘Um. Yeah. OK, thanks!’

I wish I could have shown him this -

Now, many of you simply may not care about the sea-change in our bread production methods. Indeed, some of you may actively prefer the Chorleywood variety with all of its dubious additives, but really, what have we come to when every single one of the 500 types of bread in a supermarket are made this way and there is simply no alternative?

The saddest thing is that we discovered a little village baker, not too far from our house, located in a little roadside terraced house with a traditional shop front and a rack of wooden shelves for the bread and a display of home-made cakes under the counter. I thought I’d try some of their sourdough bread, but I wish I hadn’t. It was clearly made using the Chorleywood Bread Process. Listen, guys and gals; sourdough bread should not be as light and fluffy as a 70s hairdo. It should be fairly solid and dry! I can only assume that it contained a small amount of sourdough starter, just for the taste, but a traditional sourdough loaf it was not.

Now, I know that in countries where food is more a way of life than a method of getting the necessary fuel into one’s body they are very scornful of English bread compared to their own. What do you think?

Do you like bread that is light, airy, and ultrasoft? Or do you like to get your teeth into a slice of the real deal; bread which is satisfying to eat, if a little more like hard work to chew?

* Yes, normally I would say ‘OH and I’, but I thought this made me sound more like the Queen.

** Probably. Back in the Dark Ages. Perhaps it is still done this way somewhere, but I can’t help thinking he may be just a tad muddled on this one.

Well, I blame the drugs anyway.

Since I’ve been taking tablets for my high blood pressure, I’ve been experiencing tinnitus to some extent, and when the doc put me on new ones, it got very much worse. There were other, more serious, side effects too, and in the end another doctor in the group practice took me off them, much to my relief. However, the tinnitus seems to be permanent, sadly, and may in fact be made worse by one (or more) of the other six thousand drugs I have to take these days. Perhaps the Omeprazole, taken for acid reflux … and you will know, if you’ve ever had this hideous thing, that a little tinnitus, dizziness and blurred vision is a small price to pay to escape the quite horrendous ‘HELP ME I’M HAVING A HEART ATTACK!!’ type of pain that it can cause.

Of course, it might be the diuretic I have to take – also for my blood pressure. But I do need to keep this under control or I’ll probably die of a stroke or aneurism or something like 80% of my ancestors seem to have done. Anyway, it seems that myxoedema, yet another of my not-very-interesting disorders, can also cause tinnitus because of water retention, which can affect the ears. So, the diuretics can both create and solve tinnitus depending on the cause. How very Catch 22.

But all this depressing cogitation on the subject of medical problems, drugs and side-effects is not without humour.

You see, because of the tinnitus, I now sometimes have a little difficulty hearing speech when there is other noise going on. So last night when I was listening to Italian radio on my laptop while playing online Scrabble* and OH began singing, I was distracted. I stopped playing Scrabble and OH’s pleasant baritone took over.

OH (singing): ‘Oh, a wimaway, a wimaway, a wimaway, a wimaway .. the lion sleeps tonight! In the jungle, the … something … jungle ..’

Me: ”Wimaway’ .. What is ‘wimaway’? What does that mean, anyway?

OH: ‘I dunno. I’m (starts to run water into the kettle) munching the gargles of youth!’

Me: ‘AHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!’

OH: ‘What??’

Me: ‘Munching the gargles of youth!!’

OH: ‘?’

Me: ‘That’s what you said: ‘munching the gargles of youth!’

OH: ‘No I didn’t!!’

Me: ‘What did you say, then?’

OH (sternly): ‘I said ‘I’m as much in the dark as you are”

Oh.

Now, it has to be said that OH has his own little difficulties with his prescription drugs, which cause much hilarity due to a touch of aphasia at times plus some really interesting hallucinations … but that’s another story, and on this occasion, I believed him. It was my ears, and I’m officially going ga-ga.

As they say, if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

Or maybe it was ‘in few dinner crafts, unicorn’?

Yes, yes, I’m sure that was it.

Maybe.

Oh, to hell with it.

* And how’s that for multi-tasking?

Yes! A whole £46 plus loose change – that’s what we saved on our internet shopping order today, plus a discount of 15% for a voucher I got by email.

No wonder I’m smiling as I type this!

As you can see by the picture this is Ocado, an internet supermarket which carries the Waitrose brand. I love Waitrose! It’s not the cheapest supermarket in the world, but it stocks some great lines. Some of my favourite things include the nicest ‘sachet’ chicken stock on the market (containing no yeast, which is important to me), their ‘Cornish Quartz’ brand of mature cheddar, a genuine sourdough loaf (ie, not packed with extra yeast and/or made by the Chorley Wood method), Pane di Altamura, and Tarallini, a baked version of the Puglian snack food made of flour, olive oil and fennel seeds. Oh, and a rather interesting toilet roll made of waste sugar cane. How’s that for ecologically sound?

Actually it constantly surprises me that more thought isn’t given to toilet rolls in the ‘green’ campaign, because the amount of paper – much of it virgin – which is tossed down into the sewers is criminal. Why not use waste sugar cane – or even bamboo, which is fast-growing, resistant to disease and pests, and actually produces a very soft fibre? Digressing even further from my original theme:

“How many trees can we save if we switched to recycled toilet paper?*
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the United States could save 470,000 trees, 1.2 million feet of cubic landfill space, and 169 million gallons of water if everyone in the US traded one roll of regular toilet paper for a recycled roll. That’s just for one roll. Imagine if we all made the permanent switch to recycled toilet paper!”

And that, dear readers, comes from the history section of the bizarrely intriguing ‘Toilet Paper World‘. You couldn’t make it up, huh? I’m left shaking my head in amazement at the idea that someone has built a site entirely devoted to toilet paper. But there you go … there it is, I found it, and I linked to it, so Ken Fischburg is clearly just fulfilling one of the world’s lesser known needs.

Anyway. Back to Ocado.

I shop now and again with Ocado, not only because I like Waitrose stuff, but also because it’s nice to get the heavy stuff delivered to your door, and because I get vouchers by email which can save a lot of money – £15 in this case – and they do great special offers.

By browsing only the special offer section and picking out things we normally use, I managed to save £46.90. Say it slowly; forty-six pounds and ninety pence. That’s more than a lot of people spend on a whole week’s shopping!

This is store-cupboard stuff, for the most part, and includes multiple purchases of things like toilet rolls, kitchen rolls, cleaning fluids, and the hard-to-find breakfast cereal that OH favours. OK, I admit it, and eight bottles of vino. Which were ALL on special offer.

It gets delivered within an hour time slot (I chose 12-1pm) and if they’re going to be late (or early) they ring. They also take away all the carrier bags, if you want them to.

And the really poetic thing about all this? Having worked out the prices against the savings, we’ve decided that those eight bottles of wine come entirely free with this order, because our savings pretty much cover the cost for them.

That should last us a few days!

* This is a horrible sentence, grammatically, but it is not mine. It’s just a quote, OK?