JOHN MACLEOD: The five key ingredients for a perfect artisan loaf: flour, water, yeast, salt- and, above all, time...

Daily Mail​

07-05-2025

In the late summer of 1988 – I had just graduated – I spent several pleasant weeks with my widowed grandmother, who lived in Laxdale, just outside Stornoway.
Laxdale has a salmon-river, a primary school, a Free Church meeting house and a stately single-track Victorian stone bridge.
But, in 1988, it still boasted additionally a post office and a bakery. If that business had an official name, I am afraid I cannot remember it.
We just called it Craggan's. And it sat on a lethal blind-spot of the main road which we still call Craggan's Corner.
It was perfectly safe in the age of the pony and trap, but by Thatcher's second term the authorities had being trying to sequester and demolish Craggan's Bakery for as long as anyone could remember.
Popping in for a loaf could not have been more discreet had you been trying to buy drugs. Craggan's always gave the impression it sold baking on sufferance.
From the outside, it looked like an ordinary croft-house. There was no signage. There was no window-display. It was only open in the mornings (except, of course, on the Sabbath) and its dark interior had scarcely changed since Edwardian times.
Craggan's only sold five things: bread (priced by weight, on venerable scales, and not by loaf) and four types of biscuit. Shortbread, Abernethy, oatcake, and a celebrated sort of hard-tack round you always asked for as 'big biscuits,' but which out in Lewis daylight everyone simply called Craggans.
The bread – crusty batch-loaves, out of the venerable brick-lined oven – was superlative. But it was already almost curtains for Craggan's.
It was closed and levelled soon afterwards – oh, but the corner is now so safe – and all that marks the spot of this lost Lewis institution is a horrid little bus-shelter.
In any event, had Craggan's survived, it would not have made it past 1992, when ferocious new EU regulations – a ban on wooden worksurfaces, the decree of stainless steel and fluorescent lights and so on – slew untold artisanal food businesses all over the land, from Hebridean bakeries to Orcadian cheesemakers.
I thought of Craggan's this week when news broke that Hovis and Kingsmill, two of Britain's Big Three baking-empires – their deadly rival is Warburton – are in urgent talks about merger.
Neither Hovis nor Kingsmill, of course, have been free-standing enterprises for as long as anyone can remember: they belong, respectively, to conglomerates called Endless and Allied British Foods.
But they are in mounting commercial trouble because people are eating less and less sliced bread. In five years, sales have fallen by 15 per cent.
'A very challenging market,' sighs one industry insider.' 'People are not buying as often, and they're not buying as much,' laments another.
This has been driven by deeper trends. More and more of us, in the wake of the Atkins Diet fad in the early Noughties, have shifted to a low-carbs regime – these days, regarding bread and pasta and potatoes with profound suspicion – and the current concern about ultra-processed food.
Products made with Frankenstein ingredients you wouldn't find in a typical family larder. An own-brand loaf I bought the other day from a famous supermarket chain, for instance, lists three different emulsifiers, spirit-vinegar, calcium propionate and ascorbic acid.
In scant decades we have suddenly come a long way from the village-bakery bread of our forebears – made of but flour, water, yeast, salt and, above all, time.
Dough has to rise twice. For the finest breads, like high-end dinner rolls, it has to be 'proved' three times. Serious bread also requires enclosed and ferocious ovens, of a kind few of us can match at home.
There are two other complications. Wheat simply cannot be grown in much of Scotland – too wet and windy – and our staple grains were barley and oats.
Nor does Britain as a whole lend itself to growing high-gluten wheat, essential for the 'strong' flour that makes the most toothsome loaves.
There are ways around this – the French have no high-gluten wheat either, but soon devised celebrated breads, like the Parisian baguette, made without fat and to be eaten on the day they are baked.
By contrast, we import much of our wheat, from the Canadian prairies and so on, and what one might call the Great British Bread Disaster struck like a thunderclap in the Fifties, when British flour-milling empires bought out our bakery industry.
In the cause of making a cheap, wrapped, mass-produced loaf the housewife could pick up at any supermarket or corner-shop.
So up the moguls came with the notorious Chorleywood Process, using steam, machinery and epic quantities of yeast to have dough ready for the oven in under an hour. By 1977 80% of all British bread was so concocted.
As Which? observed dryly in June 1975, 'If you like wrapped sliced bakery bread you'll find it difficult to make something similar at home.'
The inevitable backlash was led by such articulate figures as Elizabeth David and Derek Cooper and Scotland to some degree escaped the worst industrial bread: local bakers were more resilient and we were late to the whole supermarket thing. (The first in Stornoway opened only in 1983.)
There are today successful artisan bakers in all our major cities and one of the things I miss most about Edinburgh is tenderly crafted and really good bread, though Stornoway's Stag Bakeries does turn out a toothsome batch-loaf and their water-biscuits are now retailed by I J Mellis and the best delicatessens.
But it is still a sorry British tale – a legacy of the Industrial Revolution and the dumbed-down food production of the Second World War – and in contrast to the ferocious pride taken in their indigenous breads by our European neighbours.
France in this regard has been particularly assertive. Bread is sold at a dedicated local bakery, a boulangerie, and you are only allowed to call yourself a boulangerie if your baguettes and boules and so on are made on the premises, using only four ingredients (flour, salt, water and yeast) and without additives and preservatives.
Since the Revolution, too, there have been strict rules about bakers' holidays. They are only allowed a break in July and August and, in cities like Paris, they are forbidden to go en vacances all at once.
Lewis does have a minor stake in arguably Scotland's finest loaves – for Jon Wood, who founded Edinburgh's Andante concern in 2010, shares a pair of great-grandparents with me.
There are now branches in Morningside and Leith. He uses no additives. Some loaves are just flour, salt and water. The working day starts at five am; Jon's baguettes take three days to make – and his sourdough starter is now twenty-five years old.
Lockdown was tough – you should have seen the queues - but Andante survived when others perished. 'If it's a choice between how it looks and how it tastes,' Jon Wood in 2021 confided, 'I'll always go with how it tastes.'