White damper bread from Woolworths - a very guilty pleasure

“Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.” - James Beard“

Today we were in Woolworths when I spotted the above. It's a damper style bread - well that's what they call it - though I'm sure it's just white bread - it certainly has yeast in it and damper doesn't. (I think I've done damper some other time - must check.)

This particular bread comes as a round shape of lots of small pieces placed so close together when they bake that they fuse together. Well I assume that's how it's made. Mine didn't quite look like this - take away the outer ring and we are closer to today's buy, but I guess they may vary it every now and then. I've had it before and they don't have it very often, so when I see it I'm ashamed to say that I buy it. I love it - it's soft, spongy and floury and slathered with butter it's a treat. Coles make rolls that are very similar and I'm a bit of a sucker for them too (I like them with hamburgers), but I have never seen a loaf of it in Coles. Great for barbecues of course. When we lived in Donvale many many years ago, Baker's Delight used to make something similar. Theirs was crustier though. Which is also very nice.

But I do know it's the worst of the worst really so I very rarely buy it.

Or is it? When I looked up 'white bread' on the net I found quite a few articles, quoting scientific studies that sounded genuine, if small, that found that wholemeal, even sour dough bread was no better than white bread. The scientists themselves were just as surprised.

"The initial finding, and this was very much contrary to our expectation, was that there were no clinically significant differences between the effects of these two types of bread on any of the parameters that we measured. We looked at a number of markers, and there was no measurable difference in the effect that this type of dietary intervention had." Iran Segal, Researcher, Weizmann Institute of Science

They included sour dough bread in their study, though I'm not sure now whether it was wholegrain. Because it looks like that is the difference. And yes they did look at differences in gut flora - none.

"Containing the flour of multiple grains does not mean containing whole grains." James Hamblin - The Atlantic

If you have the grains themselves then you have the fibre and the goodness stored in the outside shells of the grains. If you've just got the flour then it's no different from white flour - nutrition wise that is. So if something is advertised as wholegrain make sure it has the wholegrains in it.

When I was a child I really didn't like what we called brown bread - Hovis was the trade name it was known by. And wholegrain simply didn't exist. It was just brown - and maybe it was - maybe it was dyed. Maybe it had malt in it for it did taste different. Wholemeal was a later term and wholegrain/multigrain later still. As one commentator said - we all get excited about multigrain - it's healthy sounding - but is it the multi or the grain that excites us?

The difference between wholegrain and wholemeal is the speed at which the food is processed in our gut and converted to sugar - the baddie in all this of course. Flour bread is converted speedily, wholegrain bread not so speedily.

"There’s also speculation that the way our bodies digest sugar and certain processed grains such as those found in white bread and white rice makes us hungry again soon after eating." (apologies - have lost the source of this quote)

Which leads to this bit of common sense:

“Carbs aren’t the enemy, Overconsumption, of anything, is the enemy.” Julie Jones Professor Emeritus of Food and Nutrition St Catherine University, St. Paul Minnesota.

But what is it really about white bread which has become such a derogatory term that we use it in other contexts too to indicate that something is completely uninteresting and bland? It could simply be a class thing:

"From the earliest times, it [bread] acts as a social marker, sifting the poor from the wealthy, the cereal from the chaff ... And it is the whiteness every man wants. Pure, white flour. Only white bread blooms when baked, opening to the heat like a rose. Only a king should be allowed such beauty, because he has been blessed by his God. So wouldn't he be surprised - no, filled with horror - to find white bread the food of all men today, and even more so the food of the common people. It is the least expensive on the shelf at the supermarket, ninety-nine cents a loaf for the store brand. It is smeared with sweetened fruit and devoured by schoolchildren, used for tea sandwiches by the affluent, donated to soup kitchens for the needy, and shunned by the artisan. Yes, the irony of all ironies, the hearty, dark bread once considered fit only for thieves and livestock is now some of the most prized of all. ” Christa Parrish

Which is so true and never more so than today. In my youth this wasn't the case. I think white bread sandwiches with the crusts off, for example, were the height of luxury and taste. Besides unless you made your own bread - and only hippies did that - all bread was either white or brown - not multigrain or sour dough. I too used to come home from school to slices of white bread and butter with jam. Occasionally I remember buying the bread from the baker - I think a small loaf (you could get small loaves back then) was 5d (5 pennies) and mostly it came uncut. I'm not sure when sliced bread came in but I really don't remember it as a child. I do remember my grandmother slicing her square loaf of bread - holding it upright and slicing the bread horizontally towards her. Somewhat dangerous you would think. And I also remember going into the shop at university when they had just delivered the bread and being so intoxicated by the smell that I would buy a loaf, some butter and cheese and take it back to my room for a feast. But I didn't put on weight in those days. I just ate what I wanted.

And really when you think about it - as the long quote above said - it's all the things that the peasants had to eat that are now de rigeur for the gourmet.

Anyway, today I had my decadent treat of soft white floury bread lathered with butter - and with sliced bananas in this instance - for my lunch. And I do think the flour is important. I was indeed tempted to have more with cheese, but I resisted and felt proud of myself. Not sure what I shall do with the rest of it. Maybe we shall have a cheese course after our curry dinner tonight. The cheese will take away the heat.

But quickly back to Woolworths - on their web page they have a recipe for real damper - a herb and garlic version - which looks much better for you - though I doubt it is. They say it takes 5 minutes to prepare and half an hour to cook - so give it a try.

And I'll finish with this lovely quote that I found in my meanderings through the net. It doesn't directly have anything to do with this post, but it was so evocative and the source was so surprising that I could not resist including it.

“There he got out the luncheon-basket and packed a simple meal, in which, remembering the stranger's origin and preferences, he took care to include a yard of long French bread, a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask wherein lay bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes.” Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows