Do you need more vitality, vim and vigour in your life? Of course, you do!
Around 1900, Spillers launched an off-shoot: the Turog Brown Flour Co, and immediately began to sell the virtues of their wheatgerm flour in terms of its power to invigorate you with ‘vim’ and ‘vitality’. If you ate Turog brown bread every day you would, they boasted, ‘…lay the foundations for a healthy future’. You wouldn’t exactly light up like a pinball machine, but your ‘vigour’ would definitely take off. Spillers launched a big and successful advertising campaign and many grocery shop windows across Britain displayed the Turog window logos.
The Turog loaf became a serious contender with Hovis, but, alas, its vim ran out in the 1970s. However, before its demise it didn’t take long for home bakers in the region to come up with their own version of Turog bread, and here’s a recipe from ‘Baker Mike’, who writes a regular baking column for the Keighley News.
The black treacle gives it a distinctive nutty flavour. I like a big slice of this, thickly buttered, and accompanied with a Yorkshire sized wedge of Wensleydale and a generous bowl of vegetable soup.
Yorkshire Turog Bread Recipe for 2 x 400g loaves
- 500g (18oz) wholemeal spelt or stoneground wholemeal
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 2 teaspoons black treacle
- 320ml (11fl oz) warm water
- 20g (3/4oz) fresh yeast or 7g dry yeast
Source: Baker Mike, Keighley News: Friend in Knead
4 Responses to Turog Brown Bread
genuine turog bread had a solid texture and was quite heavy compared to hovis!
Mother used to send me to the shop to get 6 loaves on Saturday morning. I was about 9 years old, I bit all the crusty corners off as many loaves as I could on the way back to our house, about 200 yds. I always got a telling off when she discovered what I had done , but I was always hungry in them days. Late 1940s.
I was brought up on Turog bread, darker flour than Hovis and made a much better loaf.
My mother wouldn’t have any other make. Wish I could get the flour now, I would love to make a loaf and try the taste. I use Warburtons. 400g bread now. That has I think a similar taste to Turog.
Joe, thank you for that lovely reminiscence. I bet you did get in trouble when your mother saw the loaves!