Bread is Broken
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Normal bread can get stale, dry and hard. But packaged sliced bread is much less perishable. I've seen sliced bread having the same texture and taste after a whole week of lying on a kitchen countertop. And when you read the ingredients on its packaging, you begin to understand why, as sliced bread is subject to the techniques of processed foods such as the addition of preservatives, antioxidants, stabilizers, anti-caking agents, or packaging gases, in addition to that bread being bleached, blanched, stripped of nutrients and with added sugar to make it taste better and because high-fructose corn syrup is so cheap, so why not. In addition sliced bread is subject to every health-related fad in existence. Low carb bread? Sure. Bread with Omega-3? Of course.
Basically the packaged substance in super-markets is anything but bread, then we wonder why our meals don't satisfy us and why we get fat.
Most supermarket bread is virtually inedible to folks that have a taste for good bread. Aside from the insane ingredient list, the sickly softness of it and the lack of any decent crust and crumb makes me wonder what market forces influenced industrial bread makers. How can anyone that has tasted a traditional loaf of freshly baked bread stand for that stuff in the supermarket?
You can search on no knead breads. They are long recipes. But require almost no hands on time. You mix, you wait, you wait, you wait, you wait, you shape, you throw into preheated dutch oven and eat :)
I was mainly hoping for the 2/3rd reduction in labor because I'm a lazy sob.
3 cups of flour, 2 teaspoons of salt, 1/4 teaspoon of instant yeast. Mix in a bowl. Add 1.5 cups water, mix in. A wooden spoon, especially bamboo, is nice for mixing, but you can use anything, even your hand.
Cover (lid, or plastic wrap), let sit for 12 to 20 hours. Afterwards, you should see bubbles or "craters" of bubbles on top. If after 12 hours not yet much bubbles, let sit longer. If change of plans and you have no time to bake, can store the bowl in a fridge for half a day or a day, it will develop a more sour taste.
You need a dutch oven with a lid, or a pot with a lid, or something with a lid. No plastic parts, oven proof.
Put the dutch oven into oven, heat oven to 450F/250C. When the dutch oven is very hot, take it out of the oven (careful, it really is hot), sprinkle flour or something at the bottom (I use cornmeal) to prevent sticking. Pour the dough in. Try not to degas the bubbles in the dough too much, as these are what gives the bread the oven rise. Sprinkle flour (or cornmeal, or seeds, or something) on top, not necessary but makes the bread look nicer.
Bake 30 min with lid, remove the lid, bake about 20 min, or until the bread looks almost too dark.
Here I let the dutch oven to give the shape to the bread, so this works even if the dough is too wet and cannot be shaped into a loaf. You can also experiment using a tiny bit less water to get a bit more solid dough. Most other no knead recipes still make you flour a surface and shape the loaf using your hands. This leads to more cleaning afterwards, so I just left this part out.
http://www.amazon.com/Lodge-L8DD3-Casserole-Skillet-5-Quart/...
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11510733-make-the-bread-b...
Baking good bread should be both easy and cheap, as long as you have an oven! That's not to say it wouldn't be better with more practice, experience, specialization, and, of course, better grains. But it might just beat "sliced bread!"
How could you have "low carb bread"? Bread is a big bundle of carbohydrate. It'd be like low sugar caramel.
(They probably have different water contents, so just comparing per 100g is a bit problematic.)
Low fat milk is made by just removing fat from whole milk; the milk changes consistency and possibly color because of this. Fat is not a huge component of milk.
There are milk products that replace the fat with some fat-like substitute; for example, a store near me sells something called "fat-free half and half", when half and half should be about 10% fat. But low-fat milk just refers to milk with a large part of the fat removed.
But the more interesting fact is that when stripping the fat from milk you can't just strip out 1.5% or 2%. Oh no, that's inefficient, the milk produced by cows is not that uniform and the tools we have aren't that precise.
So to obtain milk with 1.5% of fat (you know, the middle one, that's usually colored with blue, sitting between the green that's 0.5% and the red that's 3.5%) ... well, for 1.5% fat they have to strip whatever they can, then re-add that fat until they get the desired percentage. And what they add back is not the same fat that they stripped. No, what they add back is vegetable fat, usually from soy and animal fat of all sorts. Like for example there could be pork fat in the cow milk that you're drinking.
Disclaimer: my father is a veterinarian that has been the director of the center for food safety in my city and I live in Europe. Boy, he can tell me stories.
I can buy that someone does it somewhere, I don't for a second buy that the entire dairy industry is in on it.
It's also the case that the fat in store milk has been mixed into the milk, it naturally tends to separate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homogenization_%28chemistry%29
http://stage.rosiediscovers.com/wp-content/uploads/blogger/-...
http://stage.rosiediscovers.com/wp-content/uploads/blogger/-...
http://ij.org/press-release/florida-skim-milk-release-11-20-...
The milk in my fridge right now (not Lucerne -- Clover) claims the following ingredients: milk (or "low-fat milk"), nonfat milk, vitamin A palmitate, and vitamin D3. The whipping cream, which would be a place to add nonmilk fats if there was any such place, claims cream, nonfat milk solids, carrageenan, polysorbate 80, and mono- and diglycerides. There's corn syrup in the eggnog, but that's supposed to be sweet.
So, to sum up:
Skim milk is made by taking raw milk and removing the fat. It loses taste and texture this way, which is why I hate skim milk. It also loses appearance, becoming a sort of sickly nearly-translucent blueish-white color.
Low-fat milk is made by mixing whole milk and skim milk in the appropriate proportions.
Sugar is not a milk additive, nor is nonmilk fat. There is definitely not pork fat in the milk we're drinking.
There is natural variation in the amount of fat present in milk. This is allowed, particularly for "whole milk".
Powder milk really is used to make eggnog and whipping cream. However, it's hard to argue that adding powder milk adulterates milk.
Vitamin A and/or D3 are almost always added to US milk. That's not for any cosmetic purpose; it is a public health measure.
(The company has some sort of patented flour substitute that they make by stripping digestible starches from wheat flour and replacing them with flax and resistant starch.)
But yeah, as bad_user points out this kind of thing raises questions about the semantics of what should be correctly considered "bread".
Normally, with the amount of fiber stuff actually contains, this doesn't make a practical difference, but in the case of LC Foods it means that their products' calorie counts are basically completely wrong (at least in the US; they may change them when they distribute internationally).
So in this case, knowing that he mills it himself and that he seems to use old school methods, in addition to just baking great bread is a recipe for a better bread experience than that of simply eating great bread without knowing the story.
Even if you have neutral perceptions of sandwiches you will definitely taste the difference between American bread and European bread.
By grinding the grain in the bakery, it avoids the processing. The baker has to adjust recipes on the fly to adjust for the different gluten/protein levels since that will vary.
That might account for taste difference. Double blind trial would be interesting with different flours.
You don't even need fancypants flour. Just an oven and a few minutes to prepare it (plus rise time and bake time of course). I prefer to do a half and half mix of wheat and bread flour, but everybody is free to do what they like.
You can get good bread at bakeries, but I find that they tend to way overcharge for it.
No matter what bread I buy, bread isn't a major part of my weekly budget.
But then, I just reduce the number of walkings by buying lots of breads every time I go there, and freezing them afterwards. Still less time consuming than using the machine - but the bread tastes worse.
Not really. The cost for me to bake bread is cheaper [and while I did ask for the guy with 5-min hands on time's recipe largely because bread takes ~15 min of effort with the recipe I use], I can make it and a main course in ~45 min of actual work.
> I, for one, enjoy visiting my local bakery every few days, and they do a better job than I will ever do even if I quit my job and practice baking full-time, which I'm not planning to do.
It takes me ~40 minutes round trip to go to the bakery. Its one of those tasks that, frankly, cost me more time than the 30min I spend baking bread twice a week.
A 125 gram serving of commercial enriched white flour contains about 95 grams of carbohydrates, about 13 grams of protein, and about 1 gram of fat = 109 grams. All of those things are nutrients (about three grams of the carbs are in the form of indigestible dietary fiber, which technically isn't a nutrient, but is still good to have). In addition, it has 65% of the DV of thiamin, 57% of the DV of folate, 36% of the DV of riboflavin, 32% of the DV of iron, and several other good things.
Contrary to what someone said, I think bread is not a case where specialization pays off. Bread needs to be fresh, and it will basically take me longer to buy a loaf (if I could actually find a decent one) than to throw together one in the kitchen while I'm working on something else.
Not to mention that my half-assed bread, fresh, is better than the most awesome bread in existence if it's a day old. Hawaii is a terrible environment for bread, the crust is gone after a few hours due to the humidity.
It's not exactly dense, but it does seem to be much more substantial than mass-produced squishy bread. A single buttered slice of sourdough toast is incredibly delicious, and is often all I need for breakfast. Though it's tempting to eat half a loaf right after baking...
Oh, and the same dough makes a damn good pizza. (http://stellaculinary.com/recipes/70-hydration-sourdough-bou...)
Take a tortilla, for example. Taco Bell and Walmart have the worst of the worst. Chipotle's tortillas aren't much better, they still have that 'soapy' taste. Visit a local Mexican bakery (panadería) and buy a package of fresh-made tortillas and you'll be amazed at the difference.
This expands to every other bread you think of. Pita, paratha, bagels...
1. http://www.linkosuo.fi/uploads/images/tuotekuvat/240%20musta...
On practical note - here in SV the "German/Bavarian" or "Russian" breads or the bread from Acme bakeries seem pretty ok.
Seriously though, do you know how much is safe?
Quick reference: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/really-never-brush-...
http://discovermagazine.com/1987/may/02-the-worst-mistake-in...
A better criticism of Jared Diamond's work would be that his work suffers from a lack of primary source evidence: he's not doing experiments or directly synthesizing actual data, he's synthesizing the results of studies. And since there's no objective way to choose which studies are relevant or evaluate the methodologies of different studies, that inevitably introduces his own bias into the process.
That said, I haven't seen any studies contradicting the claim that grains in diet are correlated with tooth decay (which is a smaller claim than the larger claims Diamond makes about health, and which I think the primary studies he cites actually support).
> The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don't think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity,"
Hunter-Gatherer works fine until you reach a certain population and it seems that that population/lifestyle is below the point where you start to really see civilization lifting up and starting to advance quickly.
However, that's completely irrelevant to our food choices today. Modern agriculture is quite capable of producing foods which are more similar to foods we subsisted upon pre-agriculture. On an individual level, there's no reason for us to choose to eat grains. I suppose if everyone in society decided all at once to stop eating grains, it would cause problems, but that's unlikely; I think if society slowly shifts toward eating fewer grains, modern agriculture will be capable of adapting.
because bread in the US is not like bread anywhere else I have been, all that added sugar!
But I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't take the chance to make a "Bread Considered Harmful" headline.