This may sound distinctly pervy but I love these plump dough balls after they’ve been left to prove. They are warm, soft and fragile and soon all of their puff will be gone as they get turned into pizza bases. I love the fact that inside these gorgeous things there is a microscopic army of live beings working away. They are each only a single cell but when you put millions of them together they create a kind of magic that must have seemed like alchemy when it was first discovered. They use sugars from the flour as food and “breathe out” alcohol and carbon dioxide which is how the bread gets its airy holes. The alcohol is driven off in the cooking process.

It’s such a shame that almost all shop-bought bread is made using the Chorleywood Process, which was designed specifically to save the food industry from having to wait for the yeast to work and therefore they were able to cut the time needed to make a loaf dramatically. Now, your average loaf contains enzymes that are there to eliminate proving time. Those enzymes come from a variety of sources including pigs livers and ducks feathers. The bread that’s made doesn’t have any reference to these very non-vegetarian ingredients on its packaging because, like the utter charlatans that they are, they weasel their way out of it by saying they are “processing aids” and not ingredients because there is no trace of them left in the final product.

I’m amazed that we allow the food industry to get away with this sort of thing but no-one seems to have the will to sort them out. I have a strong suspicion that large donations to political parties, coupled with threats of withdrawing advertising spends to keep the press quiet have a lot to do with it.

So, here is my own little production line free from nasty dubiously sourced enzymes.