What we call our modern day bread really isn't bread at all, it is a product of modern food science. Real bread should have basic ingredients: flour, salt, water, a little yeast, and maybe a sweetener and THAT'S IT! I'll pick on Sara Lee since Michael Pollan already threw them under the bus with their Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread in his book In Defense of Food. If you pick up her bread in the grocery, you will see about 30-40 ingredients, many of which you can't pronounce (like azodicarbonamide). You will also see enriched, bleached, and *high fructose corn syrup*. Here are two rules for you: 1. If you can't pronounce the ingredients, you shouldn't eat it and 2. If it has high fructose corn syrup in it, you shouldn't eat it either. Their invention was little more than trying to mesh our love for refined fluffy white flour with the buzz word whole grain. Sara Lee is just one of many breads with this same story. Those of you with this exact bread in your pantry are thinking twice now, aren't you?
In the bread industry, shelf life is important, so by removing the wheat germ and bran along with healthy oils and enzymes, you can keep it from going rancid without refrigeration. Bleaching with such chemicals as chlorine dioxide also extends shelf life and gives it that nice snowy color, but it also kills all the natural vitamins and minerals. Around WWI, prospective military recruits were failing basic entrance exams due to lack of certain vitamins found in bread, so the U.S. made a law that the bread had to be 'enriched' back with these vitamins. Unfortunately, everything that was lost can't be put back. So, that is where the words enriched and bleached come in, words you should look for in products and avoid.
Real bread, the kind that Jesus spoke of, is naturally leavened. Leavening is leaving a mixture of organic whole wheat flour and purified water exposed to air for several hours or days. As it catches bacteria from the air and the yeast grows, carbon dioxide is produced and air bubbles form causing it to rise. The bacteria gives it the sour taste as in sourdough bread. A small portion of the dough is pinched off called a starter and can be used to start the next batch that will give it the same property as the first batch. A stater will catch as least 2 species of yeast, and no that little packet of Baker's yeast isn't one of them. Modern bread contains much more yeast than naturally leavened bread. Baker's yeast contains billions of yeast cells to ensure reliable and consistent results, much like the industrialized yeast strains. It takes about 30 billion yeast cells to make up just 1 gram of baker's yeast. Because the whole grain oils go rancid quickly, grain is ground and bread is made *daily*. Another interesting fact, a naturally leavened bread will not grow mold, it will just get hard. This real bread is the most healthy kind of bread, whole, natural, nourishing, and a much lower glycemic index for you carb conscious people. This is the bread that should be our daily bread.
Join me back the middle of this week for part 2 of bread. I found a local artisan bread maker who I am dying to sample some of his work!
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