Back in Hervey Bay there was about one joint in the whole place that sold decent bread. Read RYE bread. REAL RYE BREAD - not the fake kind that Helga’s lie about on their plastic wrap in the supermarkets. Ok. I exaggerate. There were two. Two bread shops that sold good bread and not the fake brown coloured stuff that also resides on the shelves in those chain bakeries whose names escape me due to no sleep and too much baby urine. The ones that have signs reading ‘rye’ but whose whole bread-shaped persona scream ‘Ha ha! My name is bland. Secretly, I am wholemeal.’

Anyway, back to the current deplorable state of our bread bin. A few days ago M went down to the Tooradin Bakery. A place I have mentioned before - they appear to do a roaring and regular trade. This is despite the fact that there are at least two other cafes right nearby. Their coffee remains pretty iffy, but less so that the other places. M returned looking hopeful, and informed me that the loaf he was carrying was ’sourdough’.

Generally, if I weight a loaf of bread in my hand and it feels heavy enough to do some damage with, I’m willing to be convinced that it might be pretty good. This bread? How does ‘instantly dashed all my hope’ sound? Not only was it so far away from being sourdough that it was almost closer to being CAKE, it tasted like it had lived on the train all the way from Perth before someone remembered to use it for breakfast.

In my fury, I googled sourdough and came up with sourdough.com - a site that I was surprised to see was Australian? Indeed, in the top left hand corner, it had a link straight to Daniel Chirico - the maker of the most sublime casalinga, which my mother and T put me on to - they usually drive to St Kilda once a week just to buy it.

What I also found was information about an request to the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) and the FSA (Food Standards Australia and New Zealand) to review the standard of bread labelled ’sourdough’ in Australia. If only they would!! The ACCC states that labels must accurately reflect their contents - I wonder if that holds for signs in bakeries? If a sign in front of some loaves says ’sourdough’ surely you should be able to assume that it is actually sourdough? Anyway, if you are interested in trying to push this point at the ACCC - there is a link in the article that takes you to the appropriate place.

And so, the pretend sourdough is now in the compost bin and I will get some legit stuff tomorrow on my regular fang into town…