What a funny old world. We hope you’re keeping safe and well.

This time around we have all sorts of unusual bread stories to weave, from Aldi’s romantic  camembert treat to outrage over expensive printed baking instructions in kids’ food parcels, virtual baking to a new discovery concerning chickpeas.

We have one warning for you. And it’s a serious one. Our friends Down Under have surpassed themselves by blending the horror that is Fairy Bread with a meaty interior to create the Fairy Bread Burger. If that makes you feel slightly sick, step away from the screen!    

Cheesy Valentine fare 

Imagine Valentine’s Day. Then think about lovely, smelly, runny cheese. What a combination. Aldi has tapped into the most romantic day of the year with their allegedly-yummy heart-shaped bread whose centre simply oozes with molten camembert. If tear and share is your thing and you like it messy, it’s one heck of a savoury Valentine’s treat.

‘Meagre’ school lunch packages contain posh instructions to bake

Low income parents in London are angry about being given ‘pots of flour’ to bake their own bread as part of ‘meagre lunch packages’ for their kids during lockdown. Children at Pimlico Academy were given the raw ingredients needed to bake bread, plus fancy printed menu cards telling them how to bake eight bread rolls. 

The parents are furious about the smart printed recipe book, which obviously cost a lot to print. As one parent said “It’s very humiliating.”Why would you decide for us? Why not give us the money?”

Players of the ‘Breath of the Wild’ computer game get baking

Sometimes, real life issues bake themselves into the virtual world. This is one of those times. The entire planet has been baking through lockdown, including Breath of the Wild players, who are racing to bake bread as quickly as they can. It’s what is called a ‘speedrun’, and it’s taking the people who love to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild by storm. The current record for baking the virtual bread is set at 19 minutes and 44 seconds. Result.

Visit Belgium’s Sourdough Library

Once covid calms down, perhaps you’d like to visit Belgium’s Sourdough Library, the only such place on the planet. How can you resist when it’s home to so many ancient yeast cultures, one of which is a whopping 4,500 years old.

Chickpea flour cuts blood sugar by as much as 40%

White bread rolls made with chickpea flour has been found to cut blood sugar levels by as much as 40%, which means the flour could eventually help protect people from Type 2 diabetes and obesity. The new ingredient is called PulseON, it has been created by scientists, and the starch it contains is a lot more difficult to digest than normal flour.

In the study the egg-heads tested replacing different percentages of ordinary bread flour with the new chickpea flour. Doing so led to a 40% cut in people’s blood sugar levels.

The flour milling process reveals the starch in wheat flour so it’s easy to digest. This spikes the body’s blood glucose levels in a perfectly natural response. But when the body’s reactions are over-stimulated by a bad diet, with its increased risk of obesity and diabetes, the spike can cause problems. The natural casing around chickpeas protects the starch inside, making it harder for the body to break down, which in turn means it’s harder to convert into sugar. The scientists hope the new flour could be integrated into other foods to help protect vulnerable people’s health.

Fairy bread burger horror

One Sydney-based cafe has taken Fairy Bread to dizzying new heights of awfulness. In preparation for this year’s Australia Day celebrations, they’ve created a Fairy Bread Burger, and it goes like this: make an ordinary burger using two layers of maple bacon, cheese, and beef. Serve it in a ‘donut bun’ with hundreds and thousands sprinkled all over the top.

Apparently people ‘love the convenience of having a sweet and savoury burger’. We have tried very hard but we simply don’t have the right words to describe how ‘interesting’ it sounds.

Millions of people love BBC Food’s most popular lockdown recipes 

Fluffy American pancakes or classic banana bread? They’re BBC Food’s most popular recipes  for 2020 thanks to the home baking boom we’ve seen unfolding over the past year. On average 3.4million UK visitors a week clicked through to the BBC Food website in 2020, and the Beeb’s pancake recipe sat at the top of the baking hit parade for an impressive nine months.

Sending best wishes to the foodservice sector

Our good friends in the foodservice sector are keeping calm and carrying on. So are we. If you’d like to explore our large and incredibly tasty range of beautiful artisan breads, give us a call. It’ll be lovely to speak to you.