MAN might not be able to live by bread alone - but it's becoming a lot more possible. Bread has never been so interesting. After years of white, brown and nothing more than a granary loaf to bring excitement into our lives, suddenly our bakers have raided the world for recipes and thrown in a few of their own as well.

So we have ciabatta and focaccia, soda farls, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, sun dried tomato, cheese, herbs, olives, onions and just about any combination of the lot.

Some are different types of bread - different flours, mixes, seed, that have an interesting texture as well as taste. Some are mere token gestures, bog standard bread with a few things thrown in.

There are hundreds to choose from, and we have nibbled our way through just a few.

If you never buy anything more adventurous than a sliced white, then maybe it's time to treat yourself to a little tea time adventure.

OUR FAVOURITES

TESCO FINEST OLIVE BREAD

Good French style bread with chunks of recognisable olives scattered generously. Excellent texture, interesting but not overwhelming flavour. The perfect accompaniment to salads.

MARKS & SPENCER POTATO AND ROSEMARY BREAD

MORRISONS POTATO AND ROSEMARY BREAD

These were both delicious, fairly solid but not heavy with a nice delicate flavour of rosemary and they would be wonderful to make a meal out of a bowl of soup. In taste, there was little to choose between them. However, the M&S bread was £1.29 and Morrisons just 69p.

SAFEWAY LIMITED EDITION CHEESE LOVER'S BREAD

Most cheesey breads were a disappointment with boring bread and nasty hard chunks of cheese burnt on top. This was different because the bread was nice in itself and the cheese - Cheddar, Gruyere, Emmental - was in tiny meltable chunks. Excellent with a simple salad.

SAFEWAY ANACAMA COB

A dense brown bread, very moist and chewy, made with seeds and treacle. Extremely moreish. This was a bread that could be eaten with anything, but went particularly well with some tangy apricot jam from the WI market. This was the only bread we ate cold.

BETTYS SUN-DRIED TOMATO BREAD

What a sun dried tomato bread should taste like - good taste, texture and tasting of tomatoes.

THORPE FARM PEEL HOUSE OLIVE AND GRUYERE BREAD

This was unfair to the others really. Most of the others were cold when we bought them and - with the exception of the Anacama Cob - we warmed them before trying. But this was still hot from the oven when we bought it and we drove home pulling bits off the loaf. Delicious. We should have waited until it cooled down to judge it objectively. But by then it had all gone.

MOST DISAPPOINTING

Ciabattas are named after their slipper shape. Most of those we tried were more like old boots. They should have a crisp crust and a good olive-oily porous middle. Too many of those we tried had rock hard crusts and a virtually empty middle. Honourable mentions to Sainsbury and Marks & Spencer, who were the exception to this rule.

Also there were a lot of indifferent sun dried tomato breads around. Ordinary bread can not be magically transformed into a taste of Italy simply by throwing a few tomato skins into your boring everyday bread.

MOST INNOVATIVE

SAFEWAY

The store regularly surprised us with yet another new variety of bread. Quality varied a lot, but it makes life interesting to try a different loaf each time.

BREADS THAT HAVE TRIED TOO HARD

Bread is essentially an accompaniment,. It should also be capable of being eaten in a chunk in your hand. It is not a meal in itself, nor a pizza, neither should it requite a knife and fork.

Because there are so many interesting breads around, it has inspired some bread makers to ridiculous heights, like children inventing sandwich fillings in the school holidays. On the whole they are not very successful.

Marks & Spencer Goat's Cheese and Pepper Bread would have been quite nice without the cheese, which went into little chunks and fell off and their Cheese and Pesto Crown loaf tasted good but was very greasy and very heavy. Sainsbury Cheese, Onion and Garlic loaf was like a gigantic cheese sandwich, only not as nice and also, at £2.99, it cost too much.

Tesco Cheese Tear 'n' Share was very solid. Solid bread, solid cheese congealed rock hard on top of it. and it sat solidly in our insides afterwards. And Morrison's Savoury Bread was a very chewy bread bun with bits of pepper falling off it.

A number of bakers make "folds" such as Safeways Sundried tomato and olive focaccia fold which is basically just a messy sandwich with a not very nice filling.

Honourable exception here was Asda's Caramelised Red Onion Foccaccia, which was very messy. But even here, the bread would have been delicious on its own, without the slithery topping.

TRIED AND TASTED

DAMSON CHEESE

Damson cheese is a fruit cheese, which is to say not cheese at all, just a rich dense confection of damsons and sugar, a sort of solid fruit jelly.

It's an old English recipe, eaten in Victorian times as a dessert spiked with almonds and swimming in port. More recently it was served to accompany roast lamb at a state banquet for the King of Nepal.

And now a pottery in Reeth has put it on the national map.

Pottery? Yes, Ray and Jane Davies at the Garden House Pottery make the lovely tapered, oven proof, stoneware pots and the cheese which is sold in them. The damsons - about 700lbs of them - come from the orchard and garden behind their workshop. They are a perfect match and has recently been given a big plug by Waitrose, of all people, as one of the best local foods in the country.

In fact the Davieses are the only commercial producers of damson cheese in the country. Not bad for a pair of potters.

The damson cheese has to keep for four months before it's ready to eat and, like the best of us, improves with age, reaching its peak after about two years.

We couldn't wait that long.

Damson cheese is wonderful. It is rich and sharp and historic. If you think most modern jellies and sauces are a sickly sweet gutless sort of a product, then this is what you've been waiting for.

We didn't try it with the port and cream, but we did try it with lamb - perfect. But we demolished large wodges of it with Wensleydale cheese which was a marriage made in heaven.

And when it's all gone, you are still left with a pretty little pot.

* Stoneware pots of damson cheese are available only from The Garden House, Anvil Square, Reeth. Tel: (01748) 884188. £9.50 per pot from the shop, £14.50 by mail order.