Carr’s Premium Bread Mix Review

Reviewed by Amanda Hayes

Have you ever been in the annoying situation where the shops are shut, people are popping round in the morning, or you need to make sandwiches for lunchboxes and there is no bread in the house? What better to have as a store cupboard essential than a bread mix. Carr’s are a well known British flour maker, based in Cumbria & established in back in1836. Less well known though is that Carr’s also do a selection of premium bread mixes which are not only useful if you are stuck without bread, but they are simple and great fun to make.

My 9 year old son loves to cook and so was really pleased to hear that I was getting a selection of bread mixes to review. When the parcel arrived from Carr’s it included five different 500g packs, each a separate variety. It included Six Seed, Malted Grain, Strong Wholemeal, Strong White & Sourdough. The packaging is very similar to a small bag of flour, but with the addition of a recipe on the back. My son decided that he would like to make pumpkin soup with six seed bread, so on Sunday, that’s what he did. The instructions are very clear and minimal extra ingredients are required, for the majority of the mixes you just need 25g of butter or margarine and 330ml warm water.

There are instructions for using a bread maker and also hand baking, we don’t have a bread maker, so it was the old fashioned way for us. Luckily, we have a mixer with a dough hook so all he had to do by hand was rub in the butter, add the water and leave to prove. You leave for an hour to double in size as per normal breadmaking, then he shaped into round boule’s, left for another hour and they were ready to cook. The recipe says cook for 25 minutes at 230 degrees centigrade followed by 10 minutes at 180 degrees centigrade, which seemed a really long time for rolls. Indeed, after 15 minutes ours were looking ready so we checked a couple by tapping the base and they sounded hollow so we took them out of the oven. We do have an Aga so it may be different to a conventional oven in terms of cooking time. After cooling on a wire rack for 10 minutes, they were ready to eat with our home made soup. I was worried that we had taken them out too early, but they were perfect, springy and full of air bubbles, not soggy at all. The 500g pack made 8 rolls enough for lunch and a couple left over for the following day, which kept nicely in an airtight container. These rolls were so easy to make, I didn’t have to help at all apart from checking they were cooked. The bread mixes would be perfect for some baking family fun on a wet afternoon, a dinner party, or boxing day lunch. On checking Carr’s website I saw there were several other bread mixes, such as sun dried tomato, and 5 different cake mixes with favourites such as carrot cake & lemon cake. There is also a recipe section with loads of delicious looking recipes from cakes, and sweet breads to pies and savoury bakes, so do take a look. You can buy all the products direct from the website, individually or at a hefty saving buying a box of seven/ten of a product.

We found the Carr’s bread mixes to be excellent value for money, you can have warm fresh bread at a very reasonable £1.25 per bag/loaf/eight rolls.

Rating: Highly recommended 5 out of 5.

RRP: £1.25 per 500g bag

This product can be purchased from Carrs Flour here.