We’ve been out hunting for the finest artisan bread tales. Here’s another batch of fresh bread stories to fill the shelves of your imagination. 

Check out our huge collection of artisan bakery recipes

As everyone in the foodservice sector knows, you can do a zillion things with bread. That’s why we created our growing collection of gorgeous recipes, each starring one of our wonderful frozen wholesale breads. Take a tour and see what whets your appetite most: Eden buns with wild sautéed mushrooms, anyone? Maybe you prefer a tasty summer tostada, or sweet potato madras with dipping bread?

American tomato sandwich hack

Next, a crusty sandwich hack. The owner and chef at Compère Lapin and Bywater American Bistro in New Orleans, Nina Compton, told Time Out magazine that the best tomato sandwiches come with a slight crunch. The best way to get that crunch? Leave the bread out overnight so it goes ever so slightly dry, ‘firming it up and enhancing its texture’.

Alternatively you can simply hurl it into the toaster for thirty seconds to get the same effect. It seems to make sense since watery tomato can make your bread a wee bit soggy.

Food waste tip – Make French Toast sticks from leftover crusts

Waste not want not, simple yet effective. If someone at your place doesn’t like crusts, toast the heck out of those crusts to make yourself some crunchy French toast sticks to dip in your soup or eat with your boiled egg. Alternatively cut it into squares and toast it under the grill to make croutons. It’s not just tasty. You also get a fuzzy warm feeling because you’ve saved food from the waste basket. Isn’t the view lovely from here, way up on the moral high ground?

It isn’t actually a lizard…

When one woman in the USA bit into a lizard trapped inside a Sunshine Bakeries loaf, she was horrified. Luckily the creature turned out not to be a  creature after all, simply a nasty, greeny-grey lizard-shaped chunk of bread roll residue made from flour, water and yeast.

Pompeii had 33 bakeries

When the lid blew off Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD the resulting pyroclastic flow and ash cloud overwhelmed the city, killing everyone in its path and preserving the people and their belongings for thousands of years.

Pompeii’s residents were clearly big fans of baked goods, with a total of 33 bakeries discovered in the city over the years it has been excavated.  The ash even preserved some of the ancient bread rolls, still in perfect shape but carbonised to a crisp.

The beautiful game’s eccentric foodie credentials 

In the olden days you’d go to a football match and think yourself lucky to be able to buy a limp, three-quarters-empty meat pie and a plastic cup of watery Bovril. These days you’re in for a treat, as reported by the Mail Online.  

Cheesy garlic bread costs nine quid at the Bolton Wanderers ground but it has to be said – it’s enormous, the size of a large pizza. Man United is famed for its glorious 30cm hotdog. Blackburn Rovers has gone gourmet with an epic £13.50 slow smoked brisket burger, cooked for hours and hours to make it all tender, and in Wigan there’s a Wigan Kebab – which is actually a pie and mushy peas inside a burger bun.

Greggs keeps big doughnuts safe

People in East Ham, London, have been nicking doughnuts from the display boxes next to the till in their local Greggs, prompting the bakery store to take them out of their display boxes and hide them behind the till.

No sliced bread during wartime

Interestingly, while sliced bread appeared on the shelves in 1928, years before WW2, in 1942 it disappeared from the shops in the USA in favour of unsliced loaves. The idea was to save the materials used to make bread slicing technology, and the energy it took, for the war effort instead.

Free frozen wholesale bread samples

So what’s all the fuss about? Try it for yourself – click below to taste our gorgeous artisan baked goods for free. No strings, no lizards, just delicious flavoursome breads to delight your taste buds.