Vote with your shopping basket
Major food manufacturers claim that the British like the taste and texture of sliced white bread, so even when we suggest more exciting grains and flavours, their response is often to add them to bread that is made in much the same way, but to repackage it as a more expensive “speciality” line. Supermarket in-store bakeries may seem like the answer, but often they use premixes, or merely finish off frozen part-baked products.

So asking questions and reading labels is crucial. Richard Bertinet says: “There are supermarkets and bakers who are trying to do the right thing. We should applaud the good ones and boycott the rest.”

The message we need to give to those who bake our bread is that large-scale operations and craftsmanship don’t have to be contradictory. “Lionel Poilâne (the creator of the famous sourdough bread) is one of the greatest examples,” says Andrew Whitley. “At his bakery outside Paris he built 22 wood-fired ovens, each tended by two or three bakers working as they would in a village bakery, yet able to take advantages of the economies of scale.” Whitley has proved that big can work as breads from the Village Bakery that he founded (but no longer owns) are sold in shops and supermarkets in the UK.

Bake your own bread
“People think it is impossible to make your own bread, but I tell them they don’t have to do it every day, that they can part-bake a big batch and put it in the freezer and their eyes light up,” says Bertinet, one of a number of bakers who are now offering classes in everything from easy breads to sourdough and croissants. Ingredients are the key, so make sure that you buy good stoneground flour. The vast majority of white flour is milled using big industrial rollers that overheat the grains (already stripped of their nutritious germs) robbing the resulting flour of much of its individuality and nutritional value. Old-fashioned mills, such as Bacheldre Water-mill, in Powys, and Shipton Mill, in Gloucestershire, crush the grains more gently between traditional grindstones, keeping flavour and goodness intact.

Buy a breadmaker
Those who bake their own bread are usually horrified at the idea of mimicking the process in a box. But your bread will be only as good as the ingredients that you put into the machine. “I’ve completely changed my opinion of bread machines,” Whitley admits. “I know many people who have come to baking via making dough in the machine and want to know more. Uniquely, breadmakers can be a meeting point of convenience and quality. If you use your machine regularly, you are in a perfect position to forge a link with local millers and farmers by buying their flour regularly and treating it as a fresh product not something that sits in the cupboard for six months.” (When you stone-grind whole wheat, you release the important oils within the germ into the flour, so you need to use it fairly quickly, or it will go rancid, which is why the big industrial millers remove the germ.)

I tried out the Panasonic SD255, a machine that won praise in a recent Which? test. The recipes that accompany it are for flours easily available in supermarkets and use butter or oil and sugar to achieve the soft texture that the nation is used to – but at least natural ingredients are doing the work and not a chemistry set. As a result the breads are perfectly acceptable, if bland.

However, once you start experimenting things get more interesting. Not necessarily successful but, as Whitley says, you find yourself on a learning curve . . . too dense, not crusty enough, too crusty, too yeasty. Finally, I let the machine make the dough, took it out (wobbly and responsive) moulded it into a ball, let it prove in a floured basket, slashed the top, put it in the oven with a little mist of water and magic: a loaf that the family pounced on and pronounced not bad at all.

Set up an online standing order
It may be that you are lucky enough to have a craft bakery on your corner, or a roving artisan rolling into town once a week for the farmers’ market, but whole swaths of the country have little choice when it comes to buying bread. However, there are bakeries who can deliver locally and nationally, such as the Village Bakery, or organic box outfits such as Abel & Cole (www.abel-cole.co.uk) Hobbs House Bakery (www.hobbshousebakery.co.uk), in Chipping Sodbury, has three shops and sells at farmers’ markets, but it also has a loyal base of online customers.

“We get more and more people ordering sourdough and rye loaves who say they have a problem with digesting much of the bread they buy in the supermarket,” says the bakery’s Clive Wells. “The loaves are sent out as soon as they have been baked, cooled and wrapped, then they are with you the next day. Often friends get together and order 20 or so loaves between them and freeze them.”

And for the passionate . . .
. . . start your own bakery. The art historian Elizabeth Weisberg and Rachel Duffield, who previously worked in intellectual property, swapped their careers to open the iconic Lighthouse Bakery (www.lighthousebakery.co.uk) in Northcote Road, Battersea, southwest London, seven years ago with a mission to bake the best artisan bread and, in particular, make a “hero” of the British-style loaf. Now they have moved to a site near Battle in East Sussex, and plan to open their own bakery school early next year.

“People used to come in with their own bread, and say, ‘what am I doing wrong?’ Sometimes they would do a stint with us,” Duffield says. “We want to pass on our knowledge. Once baking gets into your blood, there is no turning back, but you also have to learn to run a business.

“We want to help people get to grips with every aspect from finding sites to baking schedules, so that we can empower more people to open up good bakeries.”

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