The Bible sums it up best (Genesis 18:5): "And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts." But some breads are much more comforting than others, discovers Joanne Gibson.

A bit of fun did the email rounds recently, explaining the origin of various olde English expressions — including the term 'upper crust' to describe the aristocracy. Evidently bread was served according to status, with servants given the hard bottom of the loaf, family members the middle and guests the top or 'upper crust'.

Demystifying the upper crust

That can't be right, I thought. Surely the soft middle bit would have been more suitable for VIPs than the hard, crunchy crust? "No, no, no," answered Joostenberg chef Christophe Dehosse, shaking his head sadly as we discussed this common modern misconception, a result of "best thing since sliced bread" conditioning by industrial bakers and supermarkets.

As famous for his bread as his pork products and bistro fare at this winelands eatery, Dehosse explained: "Most people leave the crust, especially if it's dark, because they think it's burnt. Actually it's the best part! After all, why do you toast bread? To give it more flavour."

Clearly my own preconceived notions about bread needed to be redressed (low-carb diets and all).

Throw in the artisan breadmakers popping up all over the country (from Fordabelli in Malmesbury to La Baguette in Mossel Bay), and the recent furore over possible price collusion by the major players — Pioneer (producing the Bokomo and Sasko brands), Tiger Brands (Golden Cloud, Albany), Premier Foods (Snowflake, Blue Ribbon) and Foodcorp (Ouma, Sunbake), all of whom blamed sharp spikes in the global price of wheat, from R1700 a ton in January 2007 to R3100 a year later — and the time seemed right to take a closer look at the so-called 'staff of life'.

Bread is the one of the oldest prepared foods, dating back some 12 000 years. At first it was flatbread, simply made from ground grains (flour) mashed with water and baked.

The 'staff of life'

The discovery of leavened or 'risen' bread was probably a happy accident — paste or dough left out overnight, or for a couple of days, that started fermenting and rising due to wild yeasts present in the grain and local environment and which, once baked, was softer and lighter in texture, stronger in flavour and also easier to digest.

Before long, breadmakers in the ancient world were trying to speed up the rising process, sometimes using a paste of grape juice and flour, or wheat bran steeped in wine. The most common source of leavening, however, was simply to use either some already-fermenting dough left over from the previous day, or a sourdough starter — a batter of flour and water which, after some time, would be teeming with wild yeasts and friendly bacteria (lactobacilli, the same found in yoghurt).

A starter can live forever, as long as it is 'fed' regularly (which means replacing the amount of starter used with equal quantities of flour and water). Boudin Bakery in San Francisco, for example, has used the same starter dough since 1849; that of Poilâne in Paris dates back to the 1930s; and closer to home, a starter named Asmodean was 'born' in July 2005 at Cotage Fromage on Vrede en Lust Wine Farm.

"We feed him every day, twice a day when we're busy," says the restaurant's bread specialist, JP Smith. "We don't need to use commercial yeast at all." Bread made this way does take longer to rise, but that's precisely the point. The longer dough ferments, the greater its flavour and ability to stay fresh — an important point missed by increasingly wide margins ever since commercial yeast became available in the 19th century.

At first bakers added this yeast to speed their starters up — biga is the Italian term; polish the French (named after the Polish bakers who introduced the technique).

'Dubious cocktails of enzymes and chemicals'

Today speed is everything in commercial baking, and the result bears very little resemblance to the delicious, crunchy loaves that our ancestors turned out with little more than a fire and some time on their hands. After all, if bread is flour and water, what are things like soybean flour, partially hydrogenated vegetable fat, flour improvers, enzymes, emulsifiers, preservatives, mineral salts, vitamins, sugar and salt doing in the average supermarket white loaf?

The first point is that refined white bread flour has been totally stripped of any goodness ("it's just dust," says Dehosse). The government therefore requires about 10 vitamins and minerals to be added back artificially — a contentious issue in itself (and still about 10 vitamins and minerals less than you’d get from wholewheat bread).

Meanwhile, the soybean flour apparently has "thickening and foaming properties" to help speed things up, and it also helps to absorb the hardened fat added to prevent the bread from collapsing, which is what happens when mechanical mixers force bread to rise more quickly.

The emulsifier gets everything to stick together and the preservatives make the bread last longer.

After a stint baking the standard government loaf for a local rural community in KZN, Marc Joubert says it was the "dubious cocktails of enzymes and chemicals" that frightened him into making his own bread from scratch, an art he has since perfected at Fordabelli in Malmesbury.

'Cheap. Or is it?'

Tina Jewell of Bread & Wine Restaurant & Food Grocer in Franschhoek has also given the additives some thought: "These days so many people claim to be wheat-intolerant, but I think the bloatedness often comes from all the other stuff pumped into bread."

She is even sceptical about some of the so-called 'speciality breads' now available at supermarkets. "The same premix is sent out with instructions to shape Ciabatta like this, Panini like that, and for a cheese roll just grate some cheese on top. The dough is interchangeable, so you can't blame people who think Ciabatta is Focaccia and vice versa! But it's got a foreign name, so you'll be charged more for it…" Ah yes.

Apart from being quick to produce, the other advantage of commercial bread is that it's cheap. Or is it? "Bulk producers use low-cost flour, so what you’re really paying for is the time and labour involved," says Dehosse.

"Only… bread is made quickly and in South Africa the labour is not very qualified! In other words, bread may be a low-cost product but you're still paying a lot more for it than it's worth... "

He says bread made by specialist bakers actually represents much better value for money. "Good bread is actually a very cheap luxury. It's more nourishing and satisfying so you eat less, plus it's got more flavour so you don't need to add mustard or mayonnaise."

Flavour is ultimately why Dehosse and other fine-dining like chefs George Jardine (Jardine) and Franck Dangereux (The Foodbarn, ex-La Colombe) started baking their own bread, and it is derived in three ways: from the flour, the fermentation (with sourdough starters imparting particularly distinctive flavours) and the baking (extremely high temperatures and steam required for a moist, even crumb and a crunchy, caramelised, paper-thin crust).

'Breadmaking is a skill'

Regarding flour, stone-ground is regarded as the best because it retains all the healthy wheat germ, fibre, natural oils, vitamins and enzymes. It also has a sweet, nutty taste — and more natural yeast for getting the fermentation going. However, protein levels vary from batch to batch, so you need be a very experienced baker to know precisely how much water to add to the dough, or when to put it in the oven.

"There’s no formula," says Cotage Fromage's Smith, a classically trained pastry chef. "The dough must feel right."

For this reason, Evan Faull of artisan bakery Knead in Cape Town tends not to use stone-ground flour. "I can see there is a quality difference, but not enough of a difference. The process is more important."

Not to mention the passion it takes to go on shift at 2am, to knead the dough every 15 minutes, to note and computerise precise measurements and times… Like sixth-generation Austrian baker Marcus Farbinger at Ile de Pain in Knysna, Faull was born into this "disciplined lifestyle" — his grandmother, Lesley Faull, started the Silwood School of Cookery; his father, Tim, consults in the fresh food retail business.

Very much a family business, the Knead Support Bakery in Epping and its delis in Gardens and Muizenberg now employ some 70 people, a major focus being on education.

"Breadmaking is a skill," agrees Dehosse. "So that's another problem with commercial breadmaking — it doesn't develop any skills, which in this country is actually unforgivable."

Educating the masses

Equally important, however, is the education of South African consumers. "In France people go to the corner café to buy a baguette to eat immediately," says Jewell. "Here we buy bread to freeze. It's a completely different mindset."

Mindset also explains a widespread reluctance to bake bread at home. "People are scared of it, but it's so easy — even my crappy old Defy can do it! Sure, it takes time, but you just work it into your schedule."

In fact, reckons Stellenzicht winemaker and avid breadmaker Guy Webber, busy people should work breadmaking into their schedule: "It's so therapeutic!" He started baking his own bread "because it tastes better" and also because he’s always up for a challenge: "At first I had one flop after another, but now I've got it down quite nicely."

What's more, bread tends to go rather nicely with wine, as Webber and Faull demonstrated at a recent tasting (the Semillon Reserve 2004 with brioche a revelation; likewise the Golden Triangle Shiraz 2004 with buttermilk rye, especially when dipped in spicy dukka). As it is written, after all: "Man shall not live by bread alone." (Matthew 4:4)