How to Make Bread Taste Artificial

In our first food technology lesson of the term, we were told that the first thing we would be making was ‘bread shapes’. We watched as our teacher carefully weighed out ingredients and mixed them into dough. She then kneaded this dough and sternly informed us how to shape it. It then went into the grill – ‘a warm place’ – to rise.

The next week, we entered our kitchen-classroom to find the ingredients pre-measured and conveniently sorted into exact quantities. All we had to do was take the bowl and mix what was inside it.

Two weeks after that, we made flavoured bread. This time we entered the kitchen to find bowls containing, not only pre-measured, but pre-mixed and pre-kneaded ingredients. Our only task was to roll it out and add raisins.

‘Jam tarts’ consisted of another bowl of pre-measured ingredients, a minimalistic amount of strawberry jam, and a lump of lard. The week before – demonstration week – we had been led to believe that the lard was optional: lard, or something healthier. And vegetarian-friendly. But vegetarians, it seems, can eat anything. In the bowl: flour, lard. Mix.

‘Apple turnovers’ revealed, surprisingly, no bowl of ready-mixed dough – just some pre-chopped apple (in miraculously cube-shaped pieces) wallowing in some sort of apple goo and an unappealing grey block which turned out to be pastry.

It is not so very strange, then, to find that we are marked not on the quality of the food we produce, but on the way we plan – in short, writing down what our teacher has just written on the board – the way we sketch, and the way we ‘shade’ (colouring in). And our homework on how bread is made was levelled on our use of I.T.

You know how they say things always taste better when you make them yourself? Well now I know how they make things taste like they do when you buy them from supermarkets.