Bread by Decree

Around 1870 Cassell's Household Guide, a fat Victorian encyclopaedia of running a home, turned in its section on ovens to a painful subject. Anyone who had been to Paris, it said, would know the "exquisitely delicious pain blanc" served with butter and coffee at French hotels, with its "perfect lightness" and "the exquisite crispness of its crust". It made the admission plainly: "The superiority claimed for French bread is not imaginary." The writer added that he would happily "eat bread and butter for breakfast, tea, and supper, without any relish, were such bread and butter as they eat in Paris to be procured here". Unfortunately the French bakers in London lived mostly "in the neighbourhood of Regent Street and Leicester Square, for the purpose of supplying the wealthy foreigner who cannot tolerate our bread".

The Guide had a theory about all this. The secret, it suspected, lay mostly in the oven, and it went on to describe a French one in detail, in the hope that English bakers might copy it.

A century and a half later, British and American holidaymakers are still coming home from France, Italy or Germany and asking the same question, and they still have theories. These days the usual one is the wheat: the flour must be better over there, or the soil, or the old varieties. For a magazine that looks at the world through plants, that would be the ideal answer. It is mostly wrong. The difference between a good baguette and a supermarket sliced loaf lies mainly in what happens to the wheat after it has been milled: the hours between mixing and baking, and the living things that work through those hours. None of them is a plant.

A seedling's packed lunch

Start with the grain. A grain of wheat is a seed, and most of it is food for the seedling: an embryo sitting next to a large store of starch, packed by the mother plant to fuel the first days of growth before the new shoot can feed itself. Dry, the grain can wait for years. Once it gets wet, enzymes start breaking the starch down into sugars the seedling can use.

Milling the grain doesn't stop this. When a baker adds water to flour, the flour's own enzymes start doing what they would have done in the field. They cut the damaged starch into maltose, a sugar made of two glucose molecules. A seed that will never sprout gets on with preparing a meal for a seedling that will never exist.

Other things eat it. One is yeast, a single-celled fungus, which turns sugar into carbon dioxide, which makes the bread rise, and into alcohol and a long list of other substances, which make it smell like bread. In a sourdough the yeast has company: lactic acid bacteria, which by one review's count outnumber the yeasts by between ten and a hundred to one. They make lactic acid and acetic acid, the acid in vinegar, which give sourdough its tang. Meanwhile the oxygen in the dough slowly reacts with the fats in the flour, producing flavour compounds of its own.

A 2014 review of the science counted more than 150 volatile compounds identified in the crumb of wheat bread. Most of them came from two sources: the yeast's fermentation and the oxidation of the flour's fats. The conditions of fermentation, including its temperature and its length, had a significant effect on how the bread smelled. Then the oven adds the crust, where heat browns the sugars and proteins on the surface and produces the toasty, cracker-like notes. Parisians understood the value of that long ago. In 1874 Armand Husson, who studied what Paris ate, explained that the city's consumers wanted their bread long or flat for "the luxury" of "greater surfaces of appetising crust".

So the wheat supplies the raw material, and fungi, bacteria and the grain's own enzymes turn it into flavour. They are slow. The French government's own description of the baguette, written for its national inventory of intangible heritage, says that traditional baguette-making rests "above all on a long fermentation". Steven Kaplan, an American historian of France at Cornell University who has written several books about French bread, puts it more bluntly. A baker who wants flavour, he told The Connexion in 2023, has only one choice: to return to a long first fermentation, the only source of aroma and taste.

Good bread, in other words, is largely made of time. In the 1960s two neighbouring countries worked out how to remove most of it.

Taking the time out

That same inventory, the national listing behind France's request that the world honour the baguette, contains a confession. In the 1960s and 1970s, it says, the quality of the baguette "markedly deteriorated". Bakers used more yeast and more salt and kneaded the dough far more intensely, and the bread lost its characteristic open crumb and acquired "a more neutral taste". The baguette that UNESCO added to its list in 2022 had very nearly been ruined within living memory.

Kaplan describes what the bakers were after. Bakers found, he says, that by kneading much faster and harder, and for longer, they could turn dark flour "luminously white". There is chemistry behind the trick. As the dough is kneaded, an enzyme in the flour uses oxygen to attack the flour's fats, bleaching the creamy yellow pigments as it goes. A French study published in 2006 found that the biggest losses of these pigments happen during kneading. White bread looked clean and prosperous. The French, Kaplan said, associated whiteness with wellbeing, purity and social recognition, so the white loaf mattered to them deeply. "It had only one flaw: it was tasteless."

Britain did the same thing at the same time, and did it more thoroughly. In 1961 at the British Baking Industries Research Association in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, three scientists, Bill Collins, George Elton and Norman Chamberlain, worked out how to do without the long rise. The dough would be mixed at high speed for about three minutes, with extra yeast, a little fat and an oxidising agent (usually vitamin C), and the energy of the mixing would do the work that hours of fermentation used to do. A sack of flour could become a sliced, wrapped loaf in about three and a half hours. The Chorleywood process was in general use by 1965. By 2011 around four British loaves in five were made by it, and in 1999 a supermarket's cheapest loaf sold for 7p.

America went its own way, and a sweeter one. In 2020 the Irish Supreme Court considered the bread sold by Subway, the American sandwich chain, and ruled that for tax purposes it was not bread at all. The law it applied allowed sugar up to 2 per cent of the weight of the flour in the dough. Subway's recipe called for 10.

But what about the wheat?

The wheat explanation deserves a fair hearing, because flour does matter. Wheats differ, above all in how much protein they contain, and the protein forms gluten, the stretchy network that traps the yeast's gas. Strong, high-protein flour makes a tall, springy loaf. Weak flour slumps.

If wheat were the answer, though, Britain ought to have the better bread. For much of the twentieth century British millers prized Canadian hard wheat, and Canada's main bread wheat, Canada Western Red Spring, still averages close to 14 per cent protein. France grows soft wheat. The country's 2026 harvest was described as excellent, and it averaged 11.8 per cent protein, up from 11.3 per cent the year before. French flour types don't even measure strength. The famous type 55 refers to ash: burn 100 grams of the flour and about half a gram of mineral residue is left.

Chorleywood itself makes the point. One of its purposes was to let British bakers use weaker wheat. The Real Bread Campaign, which lobbies for traditionally made bread, says the research was a response to rising imports of Canadian wheat in the 1950s. The Federation of Bakers, which represents the big industrial bakers, still lists it as one of the process's achievements that it "permitted a much greater proportion of home grown wheat to be used in the grist". The British industry, in other words, invented a quick way of making bread from the kind of modest flour that French bakers make into baguettes slowly. Modest wheat on both sides, and the opposite approach to time.

That doesn't make wheat irrelevant. A loaf made with whole grains or rye is a different thing, and much of Germany's reputation for bread rests on rye. But the best and the worst baguettes in Paris can start from the same kind of flour. What separates them is what happens next.

Putting the time back

France did something about it in the end. On 13 September 1993 the prime minister, Édouard Balladur, signed a decree setting out what certain breads could be called.

It is a short document with a lot of stubbornness in it. Only bread made entirely from bread-making wheat flour, drinking water and salt, raised with baker's yeast or levain (sourdough) or both, with no additives and never frozen at any stage, may be sold as pain de tradition française. It allows tiny amounts of three other ingredients: bean flour, soya flour and, at no more than 0.3 per cent of the flour, malted wheat flour. Malt is grain that has been allowed to start sprouting, so it is full of the enzymes a seedling uses. Even the law's short list of extras includes the seed's own machinery. Bread may be called pain maison only if it was kneaded, shaped and baked where it is sold.

What the decree does not do is specify hours. Time is hard to write into law and harder to check. So it bans the shortcuts instead: the additives and freezing that let a bakery skip the slow work. A baker selling tradition has to let the fermentation do the job.

For sourdough the decree goes further, and becomes a piece of microbiology. Levain, it says, is a dough of wheat or rye flour and water left to undergo "a natural acidifying fermentation", and it contains a culture "consisting essentially of lactic bacteria and yeasts". If the starter is dried, it must still hold a living population of around a billion bacteria and between one and ten million yeasts per gram. Then comes a test. Bread sold as au levain must have a crumb with a pH no higher than 4.3 and at least 900 parts per million of acetic acid.

That last rule is the neatest thing in the decree. The acid is made by the bacteria, and the bacteria need time to make it, so a chemist with a pH meter can tell from the crumb whether the bread was given that time. The French state checks how sour your sourdough is, and in doing so it checks how long the bacteria had.

Better than what?

Now for the fairness the question deserves. A tourist who compares a baguette from a good Paris bakery with a supermarket loaf back home is comparing the best of one country with the worst of another. France has plenty of bad bread too, and Kaplan is the first to say so. "How do we account for the fact we have marvellous bread," he asked, "and 70% continue to eat rubbish bread?" His answer was not price: many people, he said, can no longer tell mediocre bread from good. France had about 55,000 artisan bakeries in 1970 and about 35,000 in 2018.

The tradition is also younger than it looks. Rachel Laudan, a historian of food, includes the baguette among the supposedly ancient foods that were really invented in the last two centuries. The long thin loaf had a long history, but the word baguette first appears in print in 1900 and 1904, and it reached the official price statistics in 1920, eight years before Otto Rohwedder's machine-sliced bread went on sale in Missouri. The great French loaf is roughly the same age as sliced bread.

Britain, meanwhile, has rediscovered the slow loaf without legislation. Sourdough has become fashionable, and industrial loaves are now sold under the name. But Britain has no legal definition of the word. The industry has written itself a voluntary code, and the Real Bread Campaign, which has been lobbying for a law it calls the Honest Crust Act, has spent years objecting to loaves it calls "sourfaux".

So continental bread really can be better, and the Cassell's writer was right that the superiority is not imaginary. He was looking in the wrong place, though, and so is anyone who blames the wheat. Nothing about a good loaf needs French soil or a special variety of wheat. It needs a baker willing to wait while a fungus, some bacteria and the grain's own enzymes work through the food the wheat stored for a seedling, and customers willing to pay for the wait. Britain and France both decided in the 1960s that the wait wasn't worth it. France then decided it was, and put that in a decree.