Bread towards fake

A stonebaked white baguette from the Epsom Waitrose. Not fake bread, but the packaging and presentation is a bit misleading.

Sold in a long, thin paper bag, from the bakery counter, from a container of same, presented in such a way that you might think that the  bread was baked on the premises., although the fact that the artisanale looking paper bag was pre-printed with label, bar code and so forth, did make one wonder. In any event, it looked as if they sold a fair number of them.

First up, we had the matter of stonebaking. I dare say in the olden days a lot of bread was baked in brick ovens, which one might call stone at a stretch. But I would have thought that nearly all, if not all, commercial bakeries used ovens made of iron or stainless steel - mostly the latter these days. Maybe stonebaked is a fancy way saying the bread is baked in or on a ceramic platter, rather than a metal tin. I went through a ceramic phase for my own bread baking, but have now been on metal (from Silverwood) for a while. While an iron oven was noticed at reference 3 - and I wonder today whether it is still there. Hard to see it surviving as it was then when the incumbent retires, as he may have done by now.

I then moved onto the ingredients list, snapped above, a far cry from the one that I use - which  is: white flour (from Wright's), wholemeal flour (from Canada via Waitrose), yeast, salt, oil and water. While in the Waitrose list, both the flour situation and the yeast situation look a bit tricky. A whiff of wholemeal about the flour - which might not suit those on low fibre diets and a whiff of sour dough about the yeast. Not to mention a lot of odds and ends.

And then it says made for Waitrose, rather than made by Waitrose, with the address given being their headquarters in Bracknell, which looks more distribution warehouse and cold store than bakery - although with these big sheds, there is no telling what might go on inside.

All part of the smoke and mirrors of the food and food packaging industries. With more layers of same to be found at reference 5.

I ought to close by saying that the baguette itself was fine, as good as at least some of those you might get in France - where, in our rather limited experience, the standard varies a good deal.

PS 1: on a previous occasion, I had occasion to look up Gail's. I think that the story there was that their chief baker decided that cakes and such were fine in-store, but that you got a better job on bread using a central bakery, transport costs notwithstanding. I might say that I am not so keen on their bread, which tends to have a hard crust, to be sour dough and to be off-white, not to say brown. Or with added seeds.

A story that Gemini agrees with today, in the course of explaining that it is unlikely that Waitrose do much of their own bread baking, from start to finish. He suggests Délifrance,  Lantmännen Unibake or Gails's as likely suppliers of partly cooked products which are finished off in-store. 

Checking the Gail's connection, I find various stories about Waitrose selling Gail's products, but not about Gail's selling bread to Waitrose, for them to sell on as their own, as it were. When pulled up about this, Gemini adds the people at reference 6 to his short list.

Another reminder that while Gemini is a great tool for getting to the answer, you do need to do a bit of work yourself, to add some value. Perhaps by looking into the stone oven of reference 6.

PS 2: higher grade pizza houses use might use ceramic ovens, as might higher grade restaurants offering flatbreads such a naans, but I can't see that working for a commercial baker. See reference 4.

References

Reference 1: https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/stonebaked-baguette/714403-382108-382109.

Reference 2: https://wrightsbaking.co.uk/shop/royalty-flour/.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/holne-one.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/05/april-cello.html. I am not sure that we ever took a pizza from their wood fired oven, but we did once have rather a good steak. Establishment now rebranded as Richoux, previously noticed.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/04/white-bread-with-gail.html.

Reference 6: https://www.specialitybreads.co.uk/. '... By harnessing the intense, even heat of a stone oven, we can unlock better rise, richer flavour...'.