The best thing since sliced bread? Takaki Bakery's lineup of this daily staple.
As the homemaker in a family of four, I am concious about keeping to a food budget, which means that I am drawn to low-cost food items. But as a mom of two growing young ones, I also dutifully read the ingredient list of food products to check for suspect ingredients that are potentially harmful to human health. If you look closely at the ingredient list of some of the most popular and cheapest brands of mass-produced breads, you will find a lot of questionable ingredients such as margarine (a problematic food item many food companies use to replace the more expensive butter), shortening (contains high trans fat), emulsifiers (food additives that damage the intestinal barrier, lead to inflammation and increase risk of chronic disease), and "yeast food" (collective name for six inorganic salts such as ammonium chloride, magnesium choloride).
Within the bread aisle are breads from Takaki Bakery, set apart by their minimalist clear packaging, simple fonts, and the words "石窯" which means "stone kiln" and which evoke images of traditional European masonry oven baked artisan breads. Through the clear packaging, the high quality bread shines. At first, I balked at the price. A package with half the number of slices of the mass-produced breads costs 50-100% more. But read the ingredients and you will know why. They use butter, not margarine. They use lactic acid bacteria for fermentation. Every ingredient is a recognizable natural food stuff, nothing artificial. From then on, the Takaki Bakery brand became a shorthand for me as a name I could trust to deliver healthy daily breads and I could not go back to the cheap stuff.
We love their breads, especially the stone kiln series (they have a wide variety of breads that are not stone kiln baked). Pop them into the toaster and they taste fresh right out of the oven. The heat brings out the bread's buttery fragrance, the crust becomes crispier and the inside remains fluffly moist. Every now and then, I make creamy tomato soup and pair it with Takaki French rolls... hog heaven!
Takaki Bakery is one of the businesses of the Andersen Group, the same company that runs deluxe Andersen and Mermaid bread and pastry shops. Shinsuke Takaki, founder of the Andersen Group, expressed a strong desire to "focus solely on baking authentic breads that families could enjoy at mealtime, so we could play a role in improving our customers' diets." According to him, to be truly economical, one needs to look beyond short-term savings and ask whether a product enhances people's lives. A philosophy I share and bread has become one of those things I refuse to scrimp on.
