Bread

Manor Green Road is clearly not very high up the streetview pecking order as this snap is something over four years old. Since which time the Costcutter and the butcher appear to have thrived. Furthermore, the missing right end of the building has been put up, with flats above and three shop units below. Put up, I would think, at least a couple of year ago, with the three shop units standing empty ever since.

Until last week that is, when the unit nearest the butcher became 'Chad's', apparently a coffee bar, inter alia trying for some of the building trade which uses the coffee and hot snacks machines in Costcutter. An operation so new that it does not make it to google at all.

One of the offerings from Chad's was a pile of round brown loaves of bread in plastic bags, piled up on a table just inside the door. As it happened, at the time I was passing, a loaf was convenient, so I went in. To find that this bread, which did not appear ever to have been frozen, was supplied in a half cooked state and the idea was that one gave it a blast of 15 minutes at around 190C before eating it, a little less than half what I give my rather larger loaves altogether. I take a 900g loaf described as a white loaf with rye sourdough. Close inspection of the label later revealed dried potato flakes, dried onion flakes and soya flour, in addition to the bread ingredients proper. Made by a member of the Danzar Foods Company of Telford. See reference 2, from which I learn of something called ambient shelf life: 'all of our loaves are delivered with a minimum of 14 days ambient shelf life, there is no need therefore to store our bread in a freezer. Once removed from its protective packaging and baked off the bread will stay fresh for one to two days'.

In my case I had a first go for breakfast while the baked off bread was still warm. Brown inside rather than the advertised white and a little strongly flavoured for regular use, but not bad. Followed some hours later by a gastric incident. Second go when the bread was cold and starting to taste a little heavy. Followed by a second gastric incident. From which I concluded that my reduced gastric pipework could not cope with this particular sort of sour dough bread. My money is on the sour dough being the villain of the piece, being anyway something I have generally tried to avoid, not being keen on the sour taste imparted to the bread - despite the cheerful efforts of the staff at 'Mixed Blessings', another sour dough outfit, noticed at reference 3. So here endeth what may well be my first and last encounter with Chad, actually a young woman, despite St. Chad being a former bishop in the Church of England, that is to say not a woman, at least not until very recently.

PS: following the moon conundrum earlier in the week, which turned out to be an artefact of our double glazed bedroom window (see reference 1), I notice that the eight first floor windows on the left in the snap above do not appear to be lined up, something one does not notice in real life. Is this down to the image I get on my computer screen actually being made up of a number of frames from the google film, pasted together? Presumably the pasting in question is done by a computer which does not bother with such stuff as lining up windows, drawing the line at the roof, and not doing too good a job even there.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/moon-reprised.html.

Reference 2: http://www.breaddujour.co.uk/.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/back-to-st-lukes.html.