The Breadski Brothers at a Supermarket near You

In our house we bake four different kinds of bread. My wife bakes a standard soda with buttermilk, my daughter does the Rachel Allen version with egg and oil and seeds added. I do a plain yeast and a sourdough. My starter came from one of those German carpenter journeymen that come through Connemara regularly. I’ve passed it on.

We like bread and hardly ever buy any in, occasionally Tesco’s batch which toasts well to a board like firmness. With peanut butter and Marmite. Yes, try it! Due to a foul up on the catering front and late evening shopping my gude wife came home with a loaf 400 gms. wt. by The Breadski Brothers that describes itself as THAT BREAD, The White One with the sunny semame seeds, from the smartest bakers in town. It would be too tiring for me to reproduce the varying typography. The loaf was sliced and in a little cardboard tray and it had a booklet with it. My response was ‘Polish bread’ as a joke but it is made by Poles in Castlebar, Co.Mayo or so they claim. The booklet commences with a short story of how Mark and Martin overcame adversity in the village of Krasko in the old country. These are sound people whose dedication is unquestionable. There’s a face on this bread, the face that it had before it was baked. Then we are presented with the science and the sociology. All the packaging is recyclable and as an extra added bonus there will be a donation to a charity, Mary’s Meals, as a percentage of the price of every loaf of THAT BREAD. They tell us on the booklet that up to 50% of all bread bought in Ireland ends up being uneaten or wasted. They thoughtfully sell you only 400gram loaves so that you end up wasting less. Two slice packets are available for the target consumer who likes to know that each slice has 63 calories. There are photos of the Breadski Bros. on the cellophane wrapper with that slightly surprised look that the perfectly bald have. The web site : thatbread.ie

Ethos, Pathos and Logos - all 400 grams. It worked well as a referendum but how was it as bread? Very thin, greyish probably from the Rye flour added, with a close texture, no crumb and underbaked like that frozen stuff that supermarkets with in-house ovens offer. It must be toasted to finish it. The taste is reminiscent of the vile baps that the Subway folk use. If you were to tell me that it comes over from America as a franchise I’d believe you.

The good news is that buttermilk is available everywhere.

And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's heart.

(Psalm 104)

I loaf and invite my soul

And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's heart. (Ps. 104)

If you can tie your laces you can make yeast bread. I generally make two 2lb. loaves using 3 lbs. of plain flour (not the strong sort) and 1lb. of coarse stone ground wholemeal flour. I use the sponge method. Into 4 cups or so of lukewarm water I add a sachet of yeast. To this I add a tablespoon of sugar stirring it in and leaving it for 5 mins. after which I add 1lb. of white flour and mix it up well. After an hour set aside it will be quite active. I then add the rest of the flour with 4 teaspoons of salt, you can add less if you want. The dough should be quite wet and as you knead it will be sticking to the table but staying quite intact. Push it away from you with the heel of your hand and fold it back on itself to capture some air. My experiments with wetness of the mix have led me to conclude that the only problem with too wet is that it makes voids in whole wheat bread as it steams. Sticking to the table but not in massive lumps is the golden mean.

That mix will take a few hours to double in size. Then you knock it back, divide and put into greased tins to double once more. Into a pre-heated oven of 210 C. for 40 mins. The secret of non-sticking bread tins is never to wash them.

The bread in the pic looks more done that it is.