Bread safety and quality

Bread is a very simple aliment, made just of water, yeast, flour and salt. Although who tried to make bread at home, immediately has noticed that it is not easy at all to get good results.

To make good bread, you need time and a lot of experience. Also for this reason, finding good bread, especially in some areas of Italy, is becoming harder. Bread is a kind of food that wastes away very quickly, generally it becomes too hard and so it is very hard to chew, or in the contrary because it becomes too gummy. To avoid these unpleasant surprises, it is always better to trust some food consortium, where you could certainly find good quality products.

One of the most sensible problems in this period is the one of food safety, regarding bread, the fresh one has no problems, because cooking temperature is so high that all pathogens are killed.

The real danger comes from the creation of some kind of moulds, very probably if bread is not kept correctly. The cold-storage, preferably in a paper bag (transpiring), ensures the preservation of quality bread for some days (up to a week) avoiding the formation of moulds.

If on the contrary bread is kept at room-temperature, you need to pay attention because an excessive humidity can make grow moulds even just after 2 or 3 days and also the organoleptic characteristics will expire much more quickly.

The production of bread is a complex process; the result directly depends on the bread-maker’s experience. Today very few people have the time to buy fresh bread every day or so, moreover it is always harder to find some quality bread. This push a lot of people to buy wrapped sliced bread that, besides being of poor quality, it also has the defect of not satisfying and this leads to consume more than necessary.

There are three possible solutions:

1) Buying only in quality bakeries and keeping it in the fridge. The thawed bread remains good; alternatively you can keep it in the fridge and heat it in the toaster when you have to eat it. It is better to choose “common” bread, without fat added.

2) Self-production with bakery machines. There are in the market various types of machines that can produce a good quality bread, which lasts up to one week if stored in the refrigerator, without difficulty and without loss of time. The biggest advantage is the choice of the ingredients: it is possible to produce bread of all kinds, customizing it on the tastes and nutritional needs of the moment. During a diet, for example, it is possible to produce low calorie bread.

3) Home self-production. The fans can try their hand in baking: from the beginning you can get good results, you just need to have the right recipes. After some practice, you can achieve very good results, certainly better than those of many bakeries. The degree of customization, of course, is total, after an appropriate phase of “training”. It is very useful for this purpose to have a bread machine, which enables you to familiarize with the product and with the processing stages, before venturing into your own production.