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Flour, water, salt and yeast; the basic ingredients of a loaf of bread. What happens when you mix them up and then heat them is a complex casade of chemistry, biology and physics. Most of the more subtle changes take time and can’t really be rushed. That’s why slow bread is better than fast bread in so many ways.
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Small bakers couldn’t compete with the giants created by Allied Bakeries, so they turned to science. That produced the Chorleywood bread process, which gave them a quicker, cheaper loaf. Unfortunately, the giant bakeries gobbled up the new method too. More and more small bakeries went out of business as a loaf of bread became cheaper and cheaper. Was it worth it? You tell me.
Photo of Beaumont House, former HQ of the British Baking Industries Research Association, where the Chorleywood Bread Process was invented, by Diamond Geezer. It is now a care home.
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Size brings benefits to bakeries as much as to flour mills. The episode tells a small part of the story of how George Weston turned a bakery route in Toronto into one of the biggest food companies in the world, responsible for more brands of bread than you can imagine. And not just the bread, but many of the ingredients that make megabakeries possible.
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Stone mills served us well in the business of turning grain into flour for thousands of years, but they couldn’t keep up with either population growth or new and better wheat. The roller mill came about through a succession of small inventions and the deep pockets of a few visionary entrepreneurs. They turned Minneapolis into the flour capital of the world.
In case you think my account was oversimplified …
Diagram from Wheat Foods Council.
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Grinding grain by hand has always been considered women’s work, or, in the absence of women, suitable for slaves and suitably demeaning for prisoners of war. Maybe the most famous of those was Samson. The book of Judges (16:21) says, in the King James version:
But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did grind in the prison house.
I thought it might be fun to find an illustration for the series, and I did.
There’s something very wrong with these depictions though. Samson’s mill would not be much good for grain (unless he were making something liked rolled oats). It is more like an olive or grape press.
Looking at a whole bunch of translations, many do not specify what it was that Samson was made to grind, but those that do specify grain. The original Hebrew is טוֹחֵ֖ן (thanks, Luigi) which Google Translate renders as “mill”.
I conclude that those painters, many others, and even Cecil B. De Mille, got it wrong. Some, however, did get it right.
I’m particularly charmed by this little picture.
And yes, my nerdiness knows no bounds.