About Real Bread

What is Real Bread?

Real Bread has nothing to hide. The only essential ingredients of bread are:

Flour
Water
Yeast (cultured or naturally occurring -optional)
A small amount of salt (optional)

This is our defintion of basic Real Bread that is acccessible to all.

Additional ingredients are great as long as they are natural (e.g. seeds, nuts, cheese, herbs, oils, fats and dried fruits) and contain no artificial additives.

Our gold standard is reached by Real Bread that is made:

using at least 20% local ingredients*
with not only refined white flour - the use of stoneground flour is preferable
involving fermentation of at least four hours
in one continuous process i.e. no part baking or freezing of the dough

The Real Bread Campaign also celebrates the use of certified organic ingredients.

And by bread, we mean crusty baps, sourdough, bagels, bialys, injera, khobez, cottage loaves, baguettes, chleb, naan, chapattis, roti, hard dough, stottie cakes, lavash, ruisleipä, ciabatta, bara brith, Staffordshire oatcakes, bannocks, tortillas, paratha, porotta, pitta, pida …the list goes on.

*i.e. produced using flour milled locally from locally grown grain. In accordance with FARMA guidelines ‘A definition of 30 miles is ideal, up to 50 miles is acceptable for larger cities and coastal or remote towns and villages.’

What Real Bread isn't

The making of Real Bread doesn’t involve the use of any processing aids, artificial additives, flour 'improvers', dough conditioners, preservatives, chemical leavening or, well, artificial anything.

Which is more than can be said for many of the products out there that call themselves bread.

E481 (sodium stearoyl-2-lactylate), E472e (mono- and diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids), E920 (l-cysteine), E282 (calcium propionate), E220 (potassium sorbate), E300 (ascorbic acid), E260 (acetic acid) soya flour, vegetable fat and dextrose are just some of the other things that you might find in industrial bread.

What’s more, their production also could have substances including phospholipase, fungal alpha amylase, transglutaminase, xylanase, maltogenic amylase, hemicellulase, oxidase, peptidase and protease but legally, the manufacturer wouldn’t have to declare so on the label. See our bread labelling page for more.