Ultra Grain Bread at Central Market

Initially, I was excited to see that Central Market's bakery bas making bread with ConAgra's Ultragrain™. I like CM's bakery so much because their bread doesn't taste like massed-produced grocery store bread. It almost tastes like bread that you might get in France or Italy.

I was interested to learn that CM is using ConAgra's Ultragrain™ a new, specially-milled grain. The idea behind Ultragrain™ is to combine the nutritional content of whole wheat grains with the taste of processed grains. I don't mind whole wheat bread, and ConAgra's marketing suggested that Ultragrain™ tastes much better.

I was very disappointed. The Ultragrain™ bread did not have the usual authentic taste of most CM bread. Surprisingly, it tasted even worse to me than normal whole wheat bread. The texture resembled ordinary whole wheat bread in that it was very dense and dry. But unlike whole wheat bread, the grains seemed very uniform, which made the texture much less interesting, less chewy, and more like the massed-produced texture of ordinary supermarket bread. No one in my house would eat the Ultragrain™ bread, and we ultimately threw it away.

I might expect such a spectactular failure from ConAgra, but not Central Market's bakery.