The 161st Light Browns

Not a regimental history at all, of any colour. Rather, I had just put my 161st batch of bread dough into the airing cupboard for its first rise and was enjoying the first caffeine of the day (taken with tea) when I got to pondering about the difference between white and brown flour, the difference between white and brown bread being large.

I remember that my father used to have what my mother regarded as an affectation rather than an affection for brown bread, she being rather impatient of any sort of fussing in that department, preferring to keep us on a steady diet of Mother's Pride sliced white from the milkman. But father did go so far as to say that white and brown bread were pretty much identical from a nutritional point of view and that any preference was no more than that. This was before, you will understand, either organic or ecological had been invented, let alone anthropological. Bread was strictly inorganic in those days. But he did point out, in the context of the desirability of adding fluorine to our drinking water, that white flour was bleached with neat chlorine and that chlorine was just one of the strange chemicals added to the mix to make the attractive and reliable product we know as white flour.

With all this in mind, I got down to browsing the packets. I am told that 100g of white flour contains 4.4g of fibre while the same amount of brown flour contains 6.5g. Both contain 6g of salt. So even the hard core, very strong Canadian wholemeal flour contains almost as much salt as fibre. Given the big difference in white and brown bread, a difference I had believed was all down to the fibre, one can only suppose that fibre is very light and you get a lot of it for your gram.

There is a much bigger difference in carbohydrate content with white at 71.7g and brown at 59.3g. On the other hand, the brown has more fat (bad for the elderly heart) and protein (bad for the elderly kidney) - so we have a couple of offsets to the modest amount of additional healthiness arising from the modest amount of additional fibre.

And then for obscure marketing reasons, the white comes in a paper bag with a white core, while the brown comes with a stripey brown core. Very much the sort of brown paper that one used to call kraft and which was used to make the stout brown paper bags which grocers in the US used to use to pack your groceries before the invention of plastic bags. Maybe the idea of the chaps from Waitrose is is that we associate brown paper with home baking, the WI and all that sort of thing? This idea comes to me, so there must be some chain of association somewhere, but I can't put my finger on the links.

Furthermore, the white paper that Waitrose use is not stout at all. I poked a hole in a white bag last week by little more than brushing against something and had to patch it with plastic tape (courtesy of Learning Tree PLC for some reason which I forget). I think the brown would have held up under the same treatment.

PS: good old Wikipedia scores again with a very accessible explanation of what the (originally German) kraft process for making paper does.