Bred development.

As we buy more and more semi- and pre-manufactured food, a counter-trend is simultaneously getting increasingly stronger: cooking advanced dinners and baking bread (particularly sourdough) will get you a lot of brownie-points in front of your trendy city-friends. I have to admit I fell for the sourdough movement and have been baking sourdough bread for the past two years.

The food chains are naturally catching on to the trend of the increased interest in cooking and, more recently, baking. And today I saw these two additions in my grocery shop.

One is a mix for making "lussekatter", a traditional Swedish kind of buns eaten before Christmas, and the other (and a greater surprise to me) is the super-flour Manitoba Cream, well-known in the sourdough subculture. The latter somewhat magical, in the sense that we've heard about this super flour, but very few of us have actually used it, since it's been very difficult to find in Sweden.

And so, today, I found Manitoba Cream in my regular food shop. No surprize, the front of the packet displayed a picture of one of Sweden's top names in baking, Jan Hedh. His brand promoting the flour brand and perhaps helping the brand to position itself among the speciality flour brands. The price? About €5 ($8)…