A’S HOLISTIC PANTRY #7 – When I started researching this topic, I was torn between two viewpoints: “I am a modern woman, I can’t afford to spend my time baking bread.”

I am a modern woman, I can’t afford to eat the garbage from the shops they call bread.

In the end, the latter won. Fortunately for me because it resulted in the bread revolution, in other words, today I can bake a perfect bread in 10 minutes. I would like to share this skill with you now.

Revolution, garbage… strong words… Believe me, I have my reasons for expressing myself in such a radical way.

There’s a lot wrong with wheat, with various kinds of flour, and there’s an even greater problem with the bakery industry. Bread is ‘in trouble’.

In health-conscious circles nowadays it’s trendy not to eat bread because “bread is unhealthy” or because “bread makes you fat” or simply because “bread is bad”.

No, my dears, bread is not bad! Bread production today though… well, that’s all wrong. The only goal is to produce the most bread the cheapest way. And it seems that at present it doesn’t count what price we have to pay for it. If it means jeopardizing people’s health, then it’s jeopardized. The good reputation of bread has fallen victim to the capitalistic approach of the bakery industry.

However, it’s not only bread that’s victimized, but humanity as well. We’ve fallen into our own trap, and if we go on like this, our greed is going to deprive us of one of our most valuable, most ancient foods. We’re in a tight spot, so only a revolution can help us now.
But what’s wrong with bread today? And what’s good bread like? Bread is good if it’s made from good flour without any unnecessary additives. Good flour, on the other hand, can only be made from good wheat (or other crops). Our research therefore has to encompass everything from wheat production through the milling industry all the way to bakeries. Let’s see!

The goal of cereal production today is to grow as much wheat as possible on a territory as small as possible. While in the past 2-3 tons of wheat were grown on a hectare of land, which grew chin-high, today they harvest up to 9 tons per hectare, and the crops are also much shorter. Domesticated, hybrid kinds of wheat serve the capitalistic ‘quick, much, cheap’ demands of agriculture.

What’s the problem with this?

First of all, densely sowed wheat cannot ventilate, so the water cannot evaporate after rains and various kinds of fungi can easily spread in the wheat fields. Fusarium fungi, in turn, produce mycotoxins that are hazardous to human health: they can damage our digestive and genital tract. To avoid this we choose the seemingly lesser evil: we spray the wheat. However, sprays are also poisonous, moreover, they get into the soil and leave a trace for years.

The other problem is gluten sensitivity which seems to be a growing threat, it affects more and more of us. As of yet we can’t say for sure what actually causes the spread of allergic diseases, but it’s more than likely that we are a facing several problematic factors, including the over-domestication of wheat. Wheat used to have a much lower gluten content than it has today. If we look at it from the viewpoint of bakeries, gluten quantity determines wheat value. The higher the levels of gluten are, the easier it is to bake good bread (and other bakery products) with it, the more elastic, soft, smooth our bread will be. As the bakery industry can’t afford to produce bread the traditional way, kneading several times and letting the dough rise slowly, it has become even more important for wheat to have a high gluten content. Modern agricultural technologies have also made this possible: the gluten content of domesticated wheat is many times higher than wheat a 100 years ago had.

2. Fluor

The next step after the harvest is the mill. A lot depends on this too. Mills also try to keep up and satisfy modern demands, namely, to grind as much grains as possible in the shortest amount of time, and provide it for bakeries, shops. Large industrial mills that work like this, try to get the cheapest wheat and grind it as fast as possible. It’s not uncommon to get weaker quality flour from cheap wheat, therefore flour treatment agents are added to the sacks already at the mills. Luckily, there are more and more family milling businesses that strive to return to ancient, clean technologies. They look for the cleanest wheat (kinds that are not overly domesticated, over-sprayed with pesticides), and grind it slowly with stone mills. One of the advantages of this, amongst others, is that friction during stone grinding doesn’t generate as much heat, which could damage the nutritional value of wheat grains. Flour made this way is worth much more than products grinded in large industrial conditions.

However, the market outlets for these small mills is not too large yet since the majority of bakeries seek cheap flour, since their customers seek cheap bread. It’s pretty straightforward: cheap flour from cheap wheat, cheap bread from cheap flour.

3. Bread

And that’s not where the list of problems ends because the story continues at the third level, at the bakeries that is. The goal is to produce the cheapest, the most bread at the lowest overhead and labour costs. In order to achieve this, treatment agents are added to wheat that is already of poor quality, which is another risk factor for human health.

The most widely used additives in baking are:

E471, mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids: used as emulsifiers in the baking industry. Emulsifiers help fat and water blend so that it is easier to work with the dough. It also slows down the aging process of bakery products, so bread and other bakery goods seem fresh for a longer time. It’s not harmless though as it can cause serious intestinal complaints in the long run.

E322, Lecithin: increases the rising tolerance of bread dough, so perfect bakery goods can be produced despite the shorter dough-rising process. Lecithins are extracted from oily nuts and soybeans and their use is allowed with little or no restrictions. The problem is that most of the lecithin used in the bakery industry comes from genetically modified soybeans.

E926, Chlorine-dioxide: the most widely used flour improvement agent and preservative. The health risk it poses is not small: it causes breathing difficulties, skin irritation and can disrupt thyroid function.

E100-199, Color additives: the list is long and the bakery industry uses a large number of them to ensure that the bakery goods look appetizing, that bread baked from white flour looks whole-wheat. From all the additives these are perhaps the least acceptable as the goal with these is obviously to mislead the customer. And this is still the lesser problem. The bigger one is that more and more of these compounds are proven to be strongly allergen, causing cancer and/or skin inflammation. If that wasn’t enough, researchers hold these compounds responsible for asthma and certain types of attention deficit that are increasingly widespread among children. Their use and consumption is therefore evidently dangerous, and to be avoided.

There are other preservatives, ‘raising agents’, etc, but the list is quite overwhelming and depressing as it is, and since this is not a chemistry lesson, I’ll stop listing right here.

There is a maximum allowed amount for every additive of course. However, this only makes you feel safe ‘at first sight’, because if you use your common sense, you realize that although these substances only mean a slight burden to your body, we eat bread, bakery goods often enough for the effects to add up. This is therefore dangerous.

What’s the solution? That we shouldn’t eat bread?

I think it would be a great loss for humanity to give up soft and fluffy, crispy crusted, nutritious bread altogether. This is what I implied at the beginning of the article when I wrote that humanity can fall into its own trap. If we allow it. Let’s not then! Viva the bread revolution!

4. Bread revolution

Luckily, there are positive characters in this story too: there is a growing number of agricultural experts, millers and bakers who say no to capitalistic, contaminated production. These experts are reintroducing clean, nutritionally rich wheat and flour on the market and bake bread from them. These kinds of bread are quite expensive, of course. If you can afford it, buy these great kinds of bread produced through the joint effort of these great experts. Support their work by doing so.

But here comes the good news! I could barely wait to write it down: if you can’t afford to buy these expensive kinds of bread, or there aren’t any great bakeries near your home, you don’t have to give up the privilege of eating good bread, or of putting good bread on your family’s table. There happens to be a technique thanks to which you can bake outstanding bread at home with just a little bit of your energy, time and money. This is what I would like to teach you now.
THE ESSENCE OF THE BREAD REVOLUTION, MAKE BREAD IN 10 MINUTES!

You can make this bread without kneading, without any machines or special tools or ingredients. Unbelievable, right? I didn’t believe it either until I tried it, but in the end I did and since then I think this is one of the most useful bits of knowledge I have in the kitchen.

All you need is a deep bowl, a heat-resistant pot that you can cover (a Jenaer glass or a clay ‘Roman pot’, which you can find in most households, will do perfectly), good quality flour, drinking water, a bit of salt, a little dry yeast, your oven (mine is a hundred-year-old gas oven on which you can’t even set the temperature, but it still bakes wonderfully) and your hands.

INGREDIENTS (for a 1kg of bread):

• 1 kg bio wheat flour (it can be white but you can mix it to your taste or use only whole wheat flour)
• 2 teaspoons of dry yeast
• 2 teaspoons of salt
• 500-800 ml lukewarm water (the amount of water needed varies from flour to flour, but you’ll see how much you need to use, just pay attention when you’re dosing it. I’ll write down the best technique for this below.)

PREPARATION: Pour the flour, yeast and salt into the deep bowl. If you wish, you can also add some herbs, spices, experiment to your heart’s desire! Mix the dry ingredients. Pour about 800 ml of lukewarm water into a larger bottle and as you are pouring it slowly into the flour with one hand, keep mixing the mass with your other hand. Stop adding water when your dough is wet, soft, but not runny. Most often 1 kg of flour takes up about 600 ml of water, but add the water gradually this way every time you bake because each bag of flour is different. Don’t worry, you’ll learn what the right consistency is quickly, and adding the right amount of water will get easier.

So far this takes about 5 minutes. Now cover your bowl with a tablecloth and put it where it is not in direct sunlight and where your dough can rest 8-12 hours on room temperature. You don’t have to do anything else with it. This dough does not have to be turned, kneaded, it does all the work by itself.
If the 8-12 hours are up, light your oven and set it to 230 degrees and put the baking pot inside because you have to start baking this bread in a hot pot. Sprinkle the table with plenty of flour and place the risen bread dough on it. Flatten it out a bit with our hands, fold the upper part of the dough back to the middle and do the same with the left, right and bottom part of the dough as well. You should get a cob-shaped piece of dough. Now take out the hot pot from the oven, put the cob into the pot and put a lid on it. It can right back into the oven. This also took you 5 minutes, and there’s nothing else to do except wait for the aroma of bread to fill your kitchen. In about 50-60 minutes your beautiful, golden brown and healthy bread will be ready.
You can make gluten-free bread with the same easy technique at home, but I’ll leave this topic for when we ‘meet again’ next week!

Eating is joy, cooking is magic!

With love:
A.