White bread with Gail

This following up the remarks at the end of reference 1 about Gail’s Bakery, fairly newly arrived in Epsom.

With the snap above, from the Metro, illustrating the wide range of hot cross buns available at this time of year, a lot of them with all kinds of bizarre additions and flavourings, seemingly without regard to the fact that hot cross buns are supposed to be fairly highly flavoured in the first place.

While the article at reference 2, turned up by BH, is an inconclusive two pages about the Chorleywood white bread, which it says makes up around 80% of the bread eaten in the UK, with supermarket bakeries accounting for a further 15%, and the expensive sour dough, the fashion for which has soaked right through the hospitality sector – even those parts of that sector which used to source good quality white bread from good quality commercial bakers. With the great virtues of Chorleywood being that it is very cheap and it is very palatable. Excellent for making bacon sandwiches.

 According to reference 3, the key to the Chorleywood process is high speed mixing under controlled temperature, pressure and humidity. Not least because the mixing is so fast that a lot of heat is generated which needs to be let out. A process that is fast and which scales. And it brought an end to the hundred year reign of aerated bread, a lot of it from the Aerated Bread Company (aka ABC), who used to have a large factory on the road between Camden Town and Holloway Road, a factory I once used to cycle past twice every day. A memory confirmed by the snap above.

I have not got around to buns, but I did get around to trying white bread again, using the recently adopted higher temperature method – 225°C rather than 200°C, prompted in large part by the desire to have warm meat sandwiches from the Easter leg of lamb (yet to be reported on). This batch turned out pretty well, and it both stood and froze well, but still not much like the better sort of baker white bread, fairly easy to get until around forty years ago – and still obtainable a little over ten years ago from the baker in Station Way in Cheam Village. I have yet to try the baker which replaced him, DIY wholemeal having by then taken over.

I had thought the difference was the commercial oven, but maybe it also has to do with power kneading with a machine and high water content, both features of the Chorleywood process. With this baker not fancying the bother and expense of a machine or the messiness of seriously wet dough.

And then, just the other day, I thought to try the bread from Gail’s in Epsom. A sour dough white, served by a helpful young man who explained that the bread came from the Central Craft Bakery in north London, very early in the morning before I was likely to be around. They did do their own small stuff, but I imagine that even that arrived in the shop prepared, if not half cooked and frozen. As it turned out, the bread was good of its kind, but chewy, sour and heavy. I think I like my own better – were I not reverting to my light wholemeal anyway, which I have got used to.

That apart, looking at the Epsom branch, I wonder if selling bread is not just for form, an image thing. They make their real money selling drinks, pastries, buns and small cakes.

I associate this afternoon to the small round wholemeal loaves I used to buy from Dugdale & Adams of Gerrard Street, then a baker mainly serving the Soho restaurant trade. Long since a Chinese restaurant itself. Clearly not enough money in bread, be it ever so good.

Ownership

I then looked into the matter of central bakeries and ownership.

A little poking around and I find that there is indeed a central bakery, once called The Bread Factory Ltd (Company No. 03237576), now rebadged, at least for public consumption, as the Central Craft Bakery, operating out of the Garrick Road Industrial Estate, Irving Way, Hendon, London, NW9 6AQ. Just to the side of the M1. According to the young man I spoke to, the delivery lorries sport the name ‘CCB’. Very discrete.

The registered address is behind the blue bins and there is a plate on the door if you work at it.

But there is a bread van outside the bank of units opposite, so maybe I need to look out for that livery. Hard to be sure about all this though: all the units on this estate look pretty much the same and there is not a lot of branding. Except for Angel Costumes, which has a large operation on the other side of the bank of units above.

This bread company is owned by Grain Topco Ltd (Company No. 13572366), also the owner of Gail’s and a number of other operations, not least Midco and Bidco at the top of the list above.

Grain Topco appears to be owned by Bain Capital, perhaps in connection with their Credit JJJ Fund, certainly of the Cayman Islands. At one point there were two directors, one a Pole. At another point there were two shares, one owned by Bain, the other by a Czech entity, as snapped above.

EBITDA Investments have also put money in and Risk Capital Partners LLP stay in the game. I was confused by EBITDA being the acronym for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, but maybe that is just thought to be a catchy title for an investment company.

All very mysterious, if not quite on a par with Thames Water. But nicely summarised at reference 6 – which I only turned up towards the end of this particular chase.

Bread science

Along the way, hoping for inspiration on the home front, I turned up various bready references, references 7-11 below. The first two of which were not to be had for free, but the last three were. None read as yet, but I have turned some pages.

Reference 9 tells us something of the rather turbulent story of the bigger London caterers of the first twenty years of the twentieth century: ABC, Lyons, BTT (aka British Tea Table), Slaters and Lockharts. Plus a couple of the smaller ones Express Dairy and Ye Mecca. Meat pies, bread, buns and tea were important to most of them, while Ye Mecca catered to a niche market for coffee and cigars. The big winner appears to have been Lyons, a business built from money made from the tobacco business up north. A time when the temperance movement was in full swing and when women were starting to enter the London labour market in large numbers – and wanting lunch. A time when trams became cheap and plentiful: travel was easy.

I vaguely remember Lyons, while BH can remember a rather cavernous ABC cafeteria at one end of their Camden Road bakery. BTT, Slaters, Lockhart and Ye Mecca were all new to me.

Reference 10 is all about how to get fibre into bread while maintaining palatability. The assumption appearing to be that health-giving fibre makes bread less attractive – and therein lies the challenge: getting people to like what is good for them. Maybe the answer is using fibre from alternative sources, perhaps sugar canes? I also learn about the Tweedy, snapped above. Not quite the thing for DIY.

We get some pictures of dough, sadly not labelled, and I have not delved far enough into the text to work it out for myself.

Reference 11 gets into the science of it all, with the author coming from Kansas, where I dare say they know a good deal about the cereals business. An expert on fundamental surface and colloid chemistry and on cereal chemistry: ‘… The author’s research in surface chemistry has focused mainly on the adsorption and behavior of proteins at interfaces. His research in cereal  chemistry has focused on the characterization of wheat components and their relationships with end-use quality. Much of this work has involved proteins and their role in determining functionality…’. No doubt he could have explained the snap above.

I notice that gluten has a fairly big role here. Too bad for coeliacs like FIL.

Conclusions

I think I know all I need to know about Gail’s now. Only adding that BH liked their sour dough white rather better than I did.

Not much further ahead with my own white bread, but I do have some reading material which might give me a few clues.

And I ought to get on with my own hot cross buns – or more probably cross free loaf, the cross bit being a bit fiddly. Plus, as an atheist, no need to show respect for the church or the three-in-one in private.

PS: on the strength of the searches around this post yesterday evening (Sunday), I have already been invited to read two papers about the state of the catering industry. If reference 12, from the snap above is taken, is anything to go by, conditions for those providing catering services to the likes of IBM and Samsung in India are a good deal worse than they are here.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/03/trolley-654.html. 

Reference 2: Bread wars: Some say slice white is unhealthy and unsustainable. Others lambast sourdough as elitist and far too pricey. How did our most basic foodstuff become a source of conflict and division – Rachel Dixon, Guardian – 2024. Ladies’ section.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process. 

Reference 4: http://www.camdentownhistory.info/wp-content/uploads/LargeCommerce-2.pdf. 

Reference 5: https://www.baincapital.com/. 

Reference 6: https://gailsbread.co.uk/we-have-selected-new-investors/. 

Reference 7: The rise and fall of the Aerated Bread Company – Robert Leon – 2001. No freebies.

Reference 8: Seventy years of research into breadmaking quality – F. MacRitchie – 2016. No freebies.

Reference 9: Catering Crisis in Edwardian England – D. W. Gutzke – 2019.

Reference 10: Aeration and Rheology Of High Fibre Bread Doughs – Mariam Azewanre Aigb – 2019. PhD thesis. 250 pages.

Reference 11: Concepts in Cereal Chemistry – F. MacRitchie – 2010. A book that both Abebooks and eBay seem to want lots of money for – but which is available to download for free.

Reference 12: Industrial catering - economics behind the scenes – Dr. Sandilyan Ramanujam Pagaldiviti, Dhiraj Pathak – 2022. GNA University, Phagwara, Punjab. Part of something called the Seybold Report.