Is supermarket sourdough worth the money?

Xanthe Clay seeks out the best value staples to make you a savvier shopper

Have supermarkets turned the sourdough movement sour? When the bosses spotted their better-off customers had started spending upwards of a fiver on a loaf from an artisan bakery, the pound signs must have lit up in their eyes. Labels touting the S-word (with a premium price tag) have become commonplace on retail giants’ baked goods shelves. But are we being asked to exchange our dough for a dud?

Sourdough itself is more than a lockdown baking craze. Trendy restaurants have long turned out loaves of dark-crusted bread with a candy-floss light interior – social media photos of loaf “cut throughs” revealing a honeycomb of air pockets have become a meme.

I don’t believe it’s that texture that has won our hearts. True, it’s perfect for dipping into olive oil or turning into crisp, chewy toast. But in everyday loaf life, huge holes in the “crumb” (as the inside is known in the trade) mean that toast toppers topple through, and sandwich fillings are in peril. In fact, sourdough, especially rye- based loaves, can be just as dense as regular bread.

As for the taste, while a sour tang to bread can be delicious, sourness isn’t a definitive marker of sourdough. Many of the best sourdough loaves aren’t sour at all, although a true sourdough should have depth of flavour.

According to Chris Young, coordinator of the Real Bread Campaign, sourdough is “not a look or a taste or style, it’s a process of making dough rise”. While there is no legal definition, true sourdough is made with no added yeast, using the natural yeasts from the surface of the grain and in the air.

The ingredients list then, should be just flour and salt, or possibly flour, salt and sourdough starter. This means the loaf will have been slow to rise, sometimes as much as two days. This has benefits for digestibility and “means the dough will have had enough time for the yeast and bacteria to break down the flour, and make the nutrients more available”, according to Vanessa Kimbell, founder of the Sourdough School.

These days, both independent bakers and supermarkets may buy ready-made sourdough powders, or a “clean label range of sours” as the industrial manufacturers call them, to simplify the process for less skilled bakers. These may be used simply for flavour, with yeast added for rise. This is, to put it bluntly, cheating. A good baker will still use their own hand-produced sourdough starter – and this is possible even at a large scale. As Kimbell points out: “Good sourdough bread should be for everyone, not just the middle classes.” Both she and Young single out Bertinet Bakery as an example of a large-scale baker making a true sourdough.

That’s not to say that a loaf made with baker’s yeast can’t be good quality and slow risen: in a good baker you may find “overnight loaves” which have had 12 hours or more to prove. But within industrial processes, yeasted bread tends to be made quickly, in as little as three and a half hours from flour to packaged sliced loaf.

Don’t be taken in by claims that the bread has been “baked in-store today” either. Of course legally this is true, but in practice, points out Young, “it could have been made and baked anywhere and any time, frozen and then rebaked in the store”. This process is known dismissively in the trade as “tanning salons”. The chief downside is that twice-baked bread will stale much more quickly – even sourdough, which, when well made, has a longer shelf life than yeasted bread.

IS BAKING YOUR OWN CHEAPER?

Many of us had a go at baking our own sourdough loaves over lockdown, in part because we were all at home to concentrate on creating and “feeding” a starter – a notoriously capricious process. But will making dough save you dough? Jack Sturgess (whose website bakewithjack.co.uk is a great source of fun and helpful baking videos) points out that the cost of ingredients has risen more than 50 per cent – and that doesn’t include fuel. Factor that in, and by my calculations (based on running an oven for an hour) that’s an extra 68p. Based on a 650g loaf made with Sainsbury’s white bread flour at £1.30 for 1.5kg, that comes in at about £1.24 a loaf – far more than the 80p a bog-standard white sliced comes in at, but far better value than the £4.15 for a 650g sourdough loaf from Gail’s via Ocado. And as Sturgess points out, the real value is in “the fun and joy and craft and satisfaction” of doing it yourself.

SAVING BREAD

Bread is the UK’s most wasted food, according to campaign group Love Food Hate Waste: the equivalent of a million loaves are thrown out in Britain a day.

To avoid this, freeze half your loaf as soon as you buy it: you can toast slices as you need them, straight from frozen.

Older bread makes great croutons. Cut it into cubes (whether you leave the crust on will depend how hard the bread is), spread on a baking sheet, and bake at 150C for 20-30 minutes or until it is golden.

For crostini, slice the bread as thinly as possible and lay it on a baking sheet in a single layer, then bake as above. They will keep for months in an airtight container and can be topped with pesto, paté or cheese. You could toss the bread in oil and garlic before baking, but in that case it will keep for only a couple of weeks.

Breadcrumbs are always useful too: cut crustless, slightly stale bread into small chunks, whizz to crumbs in a food processor and store in an airtight bag in the freezer. Or make dry breadcrumbs by spreading them on a baking tray and baking at 150C for 5-10 minutes or until dry, then pulverise again in the food processor. They will keep a month or more in an airtight container.