Making Bread

The basic bread recipe has six ingredients-Wheat flour, Salt, Yeast, Water, Fat and Vitamin C.

The most important ingredient is wheat flour. Wheat is grown in many parts of the world and contains a protein called gluten. The quality and quantity of gluten in wheat determines how good it is.

Warburtons use a higher proportion of Canadian wheat in their flour than other bakeries. They have a laboratory on the prairies of Canada which monitors the quality of the product and a number of farmers are contracted to grow specially selected varieties of the cereal which helps give the bread its special eating and keeping qualities and gives it so much flavour.

Gluten is one of the only proteins, which can form elastic dough. This means that when you blow air into it-just like bubble gum –the sides stretch and don’t break. Dough made from Canadian wheats react particularly well to this process, far better than European wheat. Without it bread goes soggy and spongy initially and then stales very quickly.

Before Warburtons can start making dough the wheat must be processed into flour. This is called milling. Large flour mills import wheat from all over the world. Warburtons are involved in finding the right wheat for their flour.

They ensure that the millers know exactly how much wheat from each country has to be used in the wheat mixture. This is known as grist. The purpose of milling is to reduce the wheat grain to fine powdery flour.

In Wholemeal flours all parts of the grain are included but in producing white flour the wheat germ skins of the wheat berry are not used. Instead they are flattened and removed as small flakes, by sifting over mesh sieves.