Bread

There used to be an advert with a lad pushing his bike to the top of a steep hill to deliver his Hovis bread. The tagline was "as good today as it's always been". The clear suggestion was of pedigree, that Hovis was real bread, proper bread, the sort of bread that our grandparents ate and that was good for you. Hovis always stressed that their bread was, "made with wheatgerm". I remember being taken aback when I heard that the word wheatgerm was maybe a bit of sleight of hand. It's true, a loaf with added wheatgerm is better, health-wise, than a loaf made from processed white flour but, apparently, Hovis is basically a processed flour bread spiced up with a bit of wheatgerm. The stuff you really want, for all that colon cleansing fibre, is wholemeal where nothing has been removed from the wholewheat grain.

For years, in Spain, I thought that bread sticks - the sort of bread that onion toting, beret wearing, stripy T-shirt clad Frenchmen, add flavour to under their armpits - were the typical Spanish bread. Actually, in any period piece on the telly, where the olden days is the theme, then the chunks of bread are hewn from a mound shaped rounded loaf. I've been told the Spanish sticks were copied from the French.

Of course there is sliced bread too, pan de molde, it usually comes in the shape we Brits recognise as a loaf, like Mother's Pride. Pan de molde is usually horrid, over-sweet, over processed. I'm sure someone likes it but I don't. The generic description seems to be Pan Bimbo, Bimbo being a trade name not related to Pamela Anderson's Baywatch character. Pan Bimbo is white, Spanish bread is white - well it used to be. Nowadays all sorts of bread is sold sliced in packets and it comes in all sorts of variations.

I'm not sure of the chronology, and I'm not going to spend time researching it because that's not the point of the piece. As I said, in general, Spanish bread is white. I'm sure that other types of bread have been around for ages and have been available from craft bakeries, but they were not, generally, available. Then, a few years ago all sorts of different breads started to appear in supermarkets and in franchised bakeries. At first it was just things like Pan Gallego and Pan Rústico - Galician bread and Country bread - but the range started to extend - ciabatta, rye bread, multi cereal etc. Odd outlets, like petrol stations, began to sell bread and the big difference was that this wasn't the age old story of a baker leaving some sticks with the local butcher or bodega - this was bread, baked on site, from frozen dough. I think that there was also quite extensive use of those baking bread flavoured scents. None of this was like the stuff my boyhood pal Fluff made when he was serving his bakery apprenticeship and getting up at 4am. None of it tasted like the still warm fadges I got from Arnetts's bakery in Hull at around 2am on a Saturday morning in my student days.

When the Consum and HiperBer moved premises in Pinoso, when Día got its face-lift, the bread sections in those supermarkets got much bigger. There are breads with seeds on them, there are regional breads like the Andalusian molletes and even the everyday bread got a face lift. Take your choice of a variety of formats - normal stick, family stick, mini stick - there are breads that say integral (wholemeal), masa madre (sourdough bread), pan de salvo (bran), pan de espelta (a trendy wheat variety), pan de cristal (I have no idea; it's bread that has nearly as much water, by weight, as flour), pan de aceite, as aceite means oil I suppose it's bread using olive oil rather than whatever they usually use, oh, and the old favourites Pan Gallego (crusty outside and big air holes, sourdough fermentation), Pan Rústico, also called Pan de Pueblo (thick crunchy crust, soft inside, long lasting). You get the idea - a variety.

Basically the whole bread selling thing in Spain has become confusing. Even though consumption of bread in Spain has dropped from 57 kilos per person per year in 1988 to 32 kilos in 2018 bread is still an absolutely essential part of any Spanish meal. There is now some really good bread available in taste, in style, in nutritional properties. There is also lots of stuff that purports to be traditional wood baked bread which is, instead, made with chemical yeasts, preservatives, saturated fats, processed flour and baked from frozen dough. The stuff that says home made, wholemeal bread is actually dyed with caramel and produced in articulated lorry sized quantities by robot mixing machines and conveyor belt ovens. So, from July this year we'll have new laws about labelling bread which will take over from the last set of rules drafted in 1984.

I'm going to use a fair bit of Spanish in this next section on the basis that anyone living in Spain and reading this post might use the information when they go shopping. It's also a bit technical, formal and probably a little bit tedious. So non Spanish dwellers please skip to the last para. It's not my fault, writing about new regulations is hardly the stuff of bodice rippers or doctor and nurse literature.

Some of the big things in the new regs are:

• Ordinary bread, pan común, the bread made from mixed flours with water laced with yeast has to be fresh, made that day. If the bread has not been made today it has to be clearly labelled that it is not today's bread. 
• Casero, home made, will have to mean that it is made by people on a human scale with a qualified master baker on hand. 
• Masa madre, sourdough, can only be made with flour, water and salt with the yeasts being naturally occurring in that mix. No more adding yoghurt or vinegar to speed up the sourdough process
• Fermentación lenta, slow fermentation, has to mean that. At least eight hours at temperatures around 4ºC for the dough.
• Wood baked, pan de leña, will also mean what it sounds like. Burn wood to heat the oven and it's good. Blow the scent of wood smoke into the mix and it's not.
• Brown bread, pan integral, which is still not particularly popular amongst the majority of Spaniards, means that from July wholemeal bread has to be made from whole grain and the grain has to be named. There is still a bit of a labelling get out in that if they use a mixture of processed and wholegrain flour they can label the bread as elaborado con harina integral, made with wholegrain flour, and specify the percentage (would you like to place a bet on the different sizes of typeface?). Instead of calling this integral it can also be called de grano entero, whole grain.
• Breads made with cereals like rye (centeno) or oats (avena) and a whole lot more, can only be labelled as such if they have the percentages of the cereal required by the new law. The percentage depends on the cereal. Multi cereal bread, pan multicereal, has to have a least three different cereals and have at least 10% of each of those cereals. 

There are other labelling requirements, for instance it can't just say vegetable oil on the side of the bag, it must say palm oil or sunflower oil or whatever. The salt content will also be reducing but that's on a sliding scale over time so that bread doesn't become too bland for consumers overnight. Oh, and they're reducing the VAT rate to 4% which may mean a few cents off the price.

Lets's hope it all works out and we get more and more yummy bread.