Our Daily Bread
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday April 8, 2003
This most ancient food has been maligned as unhealthy or fattening but, from fluffy white to crusty woodfired, all bread is good for you.
Saturday, 3.42am. Bread dough is rising. Balls of it are everywhere under black plastic sheets in a bakehouse on a Paddington back street. It is a room hurried with silent handiwork. Flour is dusted onto workbenches, dough is cut into round balls, baking trays are brushed with butter. Croissants are in the oven.
In the street outside, beneath a fingernail moon and languishing stars, the hydraulic brakes of a garbage truck sigh in the night cool. In here, the oven's at 200C and only just warming up. The brow and nape of the neck of Richard Francois glisten. Under hard fluorescent light, the Frenchman labours with the repeated tasks of an age-old trade.
The baker. He gives us this day our daily bread. To do so, he starts some time after 2am, mixing 2 1/2 of the 25kg bags of baker's flour stacked high against the wall with two pails of water, 1kg of salt and 300g of yeast. From such a simple formula arise most of the breads of La Gerbe d'Or (the golden sheaf), the oldest and most artful French baker in the city.
Making good bread is not just a technique. It is a type of meditation, says master baker and shop proprietor Franck Francois - Richard's father.
At 4.50am the first loaves are pulled from the oven and tossed on a wire rack. The croissants have been wheeled out: 10 trays high, 24 to a tray.
At 6.18am the oven timer chimes. The bakery door to the street is opened and a trolley of bread is rolled into the doorway to cool quickly. The first milky scratches of dawn streak the sky. Currawongs are carolling. The first baguettes of the morning are baked.
GIVE US this day our daily carbohydrate, fibre, vitamins, minerals and protein.
It's a line from a 1994 health advertising campaign, pitched at women and intended to reverse a slump in consumption of that most biblical and nutritional of foods: bread.
It was a distress call. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in the late-1950s, Australians ate an average 69kg of bread a head a year, falling by the late-1980s to 44kg with consequences for the health of the nation. According to medical and nutrition experts, less bread consumed means - among other ailments - more heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity.
"If everybody ate one additional slice of bread a day that would make quite some difference," says Trish Griffiths, the nutrition services manager for BRI Australia, an independent grains and bread research organisation. She says all breads are nourishing. People have a healthy image of fruits and vegetables, but it seems difficult to get that message across for grain foods.
Hence, the National Bread Campaign, launched in 1994, financed by federal and state health authorities and run in magazines such as Women's Weekly, Woman's Day, New Idea and Family Circle. The message was simple: we should all eat more bread, more often.
So did the soft sell work? According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, yearly bread consumption increased to 53.4kg a person.
But the rise may have been short-lived. The latest NSW Health survey found only 24 per cent of men and 11 per cent of women eat the recommended quantity of bread and
cereals stipulated by the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating.
The National Health and Medical Research Council's dietary guidelines place breads and cereals in the top bracket of essential foods, along with vegetables (including legumes) and fruits. Women should consume four to eight serves of breads and cereals a day and men 5-12 serves. (A serve is equivalent to two 30g slices of bread.)
"We should eat more bread," says Edwina Macoun, a senior nutritionist with NSW Health. "Women are better than men at eating the recommended levels of fruit and vegetables, but for breads and cereals it's the other way around."
The reasons for bread being seen as a masculine food are mostly because of modern wives' tales: the cult of low-carbohydrate diets and the myth that bread is fattening. The current preaching of "bread is bad" is causing some to steer clear of it almost entirely.
Noses are particularly turned up at highly processed, packaged breads. Phillip Searle, of Blackheath Bakery (and Vulcans restaurant) repute, is the owner of Infinity Sourdough Bakery in Darlinghurst. He sums up those dismissive of supermarket sliced white bread. "I call it plastic bread," he says. "Cotton-wool bread. It's probably doing nobody any good whatsoever."
A denouncement, perhaps, of much of the baked goods of the two multinationals that take the dominant chunk of the $3.9 billion national bread and cake retail market.
They are Goodman Fielder (recently acquired by the New Zealand food manufacturer Burns Philp), whose brands include Buttercup, Uncle Tobys, Wonder White, Helga's, Vogels and Sunicrust. And George Weston Foods, with brand names such as Noble Rise, Burgen and Tip Top.
The flavour of a sliced white loaf of Tip Top mightn't measure up against a white sourdough from an artisan bakery, but the nutritional value does. "All breads are nutritious," says Griffiths, co-ordinator of the National Bread Campaign. "All breads contain proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and fibre." The fact that bread comes sliced and wrapped "doesn't reflect its nutritional value at all".
White bread is of good nutritional quality, although brown and mixed-grain breads provide about twice the recommended dietary fibre and wholemeal provides about 2 1/2
times the desired amount of fibre, zinc and riboflavin.
"It's all good," says Frenchwoman Myriam Cordelier from the office of Victoire, her Balmain bakery. "There's no bad bread."
Even the presence of a Baker's Delight franchise a few doors from her shop doesn't chafe her spirit. "It's bringing bread to all and sandwiches for the children," she says. "Children should be given a good bread, instead of encouraging them to eat a fluffy bread. But I understand for the mother it's easy to pack the lunch with white bread."
Nearby, in the backroom of the Haberfield Bakery, Riccardo Cassaniti is similarly unflappable. "Bread is bread. It's made out of flour and salt. I don't see any bad bread."
One of four sons of Antonino Cassaniti, a Sicilian who arrived at Circular Quay in early 1960 and opened his bakery in 1969, Riccardo bakes breads from recipes of a brother-in-law in Milan. Little has changed in the shop since 1969, including the fluorescent lights, homespun charm and wooden shelves stacked with all manner of bread, none of which is identified. "Italians know our bread for what it is because it's in our history," explains Riccardo. "They've always known the ciabatti, the rosetta, pannini, the feloncinni. They've always known we've got crusty outside and soft inside bread."
In Paddington, Franck Francois is explaining the origin of his epi, a bread stick of all pointed ends, baked so children of a large family needn't argue over the quignon - the two ends of a baguette. "There's nothing wrong with white bread. It's as good as anything else," he says of its nutritional value.
ALL COOKERY tells a story. And each religion and culture has its own recipes - written down as mementos of ritualistic feasts and fasts, of ancient dietary laws and taboos. Apples and olives, honey and salted meat, rosemary and thyme. Each ingredient recalls stories of suffrage and redemption.
Of all the foods in the history of religion, the most sacred is bread. "In Christian belief bread and wine are the potent symbols of nourishment, of God's blessing," says Father Gerard Moore, lecturer in liturgy at the Catholic Institute of Sydney. "In the story of the Last Supper, the meal tradition is reduced to bread and wine as the symbol of His presence and God's ongoing nurturing."
Bread is part of the Eucharist. It is mentioned more than 100 times in the Bible,
a book rich in references to the shared table, lamb, fish, wine and the bread of life. Christians in every phase of history have solemnly taken bread and wine, recited the words of Jesus at the Last Supper and offered prayer for the Blessed Sacrament.
Similarly, in the Jewish festival of Passover - like Easter, an observance that occurs in the European early spring, a season of rebirth and renewal - bread is an intrinsic symbol of remembrance. "It is the central feature of the Passover diet," says senior rabbi Raymond Apple of the Great Synagogue.
Biscuits of unleavened bread, matzo, are eaten with the ritual meal on the first two nights of Passover, beginning this year at sunset on April 16.
"Bread gives a meal status," says Apple. "There is a great deal of importance attached to eating bread. Benediction is said over the bread before the meal begins. If there is no bread there is something missing from the table."
Six of the best
Bowan Island Bakery
183 Victoria Road, Drummoyne, 9181 3524. Co-owner David Cummings worked in a Vancouver bakery and learned to make sourdough and soda bread, hence the name Bowan Island, which is near Vancouver. Great for nourishing sourdoughs baked from organic, bio-dynamic flours.
Haberfield Bakery
153 Ramsay Street, Haberfield, 9797 7715. Antonino Cassaniti is believed to be the first baker in Sydney to produce a rosetta roll, crispy-crusted with a soft and hollow interior (sold at first to wedding reception halls). Now his son Riccardo continues baking the crunchy breads of this Italian institution.
Infinity Sourdough Bakery 225 Victoria Street, Darlinghurst, 9380 4320. A white marble counter, a winter squash by the cash register. These epitomise the simplicity of this beautiful bakery and its sourdoughs, which contain no additives and are made from organic flours grown and stone-ground in northern NSW. Earthy flavoured and superbly textured bread.
La Gerbe D'or
255 Glenmore Road, Paddington, 9331 1070. "Bread is central for the human being," says Franck Francois. "We should eat more bread." Especially the sticks, loaves and rolls from his landmark French boulangerie and patisserie in the hub of Paddington. His credentials are gilt-framed on the wall. Diploma Gastronomie - qualite. No translation required.
Sonoma Woodfired Baking Company
215a Glebe Point Road, Glebe, 9660 2116. Specialising in spelt bread, an ancient cereal that grew as wild grass and was cultivated in the Middle East before today's genetically modified wheat varieties. The spelt is sourced from an organic farm near Parkes and baked in a woodfired kiln in Arncliffe. It's little wonder the sourdoughs of this newly-opened outlet have had many mouths eating and talking with enthusiasm.
Victoire
285 Darling Street Balmain, 9818 5529. "The one I do is not so crusty. It's more silky." So says expatriate French baker Myriam Cordelier of the sourdough bread sold at her Balmain bakery. "It's my feeling that the inside of a bread needs to be well-balanced," she says. Those who've eaten her levain, boule, baguettes and famed walnut bread would suggest they're exquisitely balanced.
Hot cross buns
Hot cross buns.
Hot cross buns. One-a-penny, two-a-penny,
hot cross buns.
It's a popular song in schools at this time of year. In the days leading up to Good Friday, children love to get their teeth into these sticky buns, toasted and buttered for breakfast in the Easter tradition.
The buns - nowadays allegorical of the crucifixion - are pagan in origin. They were first baked for festivals in ancient Greece and Rome marking the vernal equinox and arrival of the northern spring. But as with many old culinary customs, the church appropriated the buns and reinterpreted what were horn marks (from a sacrificial ox) to the symbol of a cross.
From the Middle Ages it is believed all loaves were marked with a cross before baking to muddle witchcraft that might enter the oven and make the bread turn out too heavy. The cross later had practical purposes:
it enabled the bread to be divided into equal quarters and shared after morning mass.
Whatever the history, it's certain the heady and homely aroma of these bread rolls baking in the oven, sweetened with cinnamon and mixed spice, will ensure they sell like hot cakes this Easter.
© 2003 Sydney Morning Herald