The May Day weekend in Barcaldine is our biggest weekend for the town. As Barcaldine is where the labour political party was born, Barcaldine comes alive with festivities to celebrate labour day in Australia. This includes numerous activities across the weekend including a hoedown on Friday night, Saturday morning markets along the main street, horse races, town party, drag races, goat races, football and finally a May Day parade to finish proceedings on Monday.
So that we don't have to explain all the events every time we describe this weekend to outsiders, we call it the Tree of Knowledge festival. Named after the Tree of Knowledge under which the Labour party came to fruition 100 something years ago. Coincidentally, we have a sour dough loaf after the Tree of Knowledge namesake - the Dough of Knowledge. Come in and try it, especially this weekend when we will have it baked fresh all weekend!
As you can imagine, with so much happening in Barcaldine this weekend, this becomes the bakery's biggest weekend of the year, outdoing the traditional Christmas and Easter periods. If you want to know more about the Tree of Knowledge Festival, try this link - http://www.treeofknowledge.com.au/
During the week I also saw a TV ad from a prominent franchise bakery chain in Australia claiming they had got rid of all the additives in their bread products with E numbers. These additives include emulsifiers and dough conditioners that have names that you might have heard of before. Such as additive E300. Sounds pretty scary right? I don't know about you, but I don't want to eat something with a number attached to it. Sounds like it was synthetically made in a laboratory, and some crazy scientist decided it would be good to put in food.Well did you know that additive E300 is commonly known as Vitamin C? When used in bread making, the usage is less than 0.01% to the flour. Vitamin C is used to strengthen the gluten in the bread so that the bread can retain more gas produced by the yeast. Did you know that capsicum has the highest naturally found percentage of Vitamin C with almost 1% Vitamin C per weight? This is even more than oranges!
Even some artisan breads contain Vitamin C for the same purpose. It is very hard to produce an instant dough bread characteristic of the bakery franchises bread without this important additive, and indeed, we use Vitamin C in our white bread loaves.
The only breads that don't contain Vitamin C is artisan bread such as Sourdough and Turkish bread that we sell in store.
So how did this prominent bakery franchise banish all these additives that are so bad for you? While I don't have any proof, I would imagine their ingredients list wouldn't include additive number E300, but instead list Vitamin C.
There is some capsicum for thought. Don't believe everything you see on TV.
