I’ve had a love/hate relationship with bread. I’ve always wanted to be a good bread baker. Maybe its the fact that my grandfather was a baker. It might be in my blood.
But there are many frustrations: I’ve never really made a great loaf of bread. Usually they are too dense. I also am gluten intolerant to some degree, and for some reason, fresh bread bothers me more than store bought. It gives me hiccups. Yes, hiccups. (it didn’t make sense to me until a lactation consultant that I was presenting with at a conference shared that hiccups in the womb are often a sign of food allergy — usually pasturized cows milk).
So I tried sourdough. Still dense, though I loved the tang. Some people said that sourdough is more easily tolerated, but the hiccups still came. And they hurt. Probably because in order to get the dough dry enough to knead, I had to add a lot more flour.
Sometimes it seems easier to give up bread. But I keep coming back to the urge to make it. I can’t stand all the chemicals in store bought. And I want reasonably whole grain bread for my kids if I can’t have it for me.
When I started learning about more traditional ways of preparing foods in Nourishing Traditions, one of the basics was that many traditional cultures soaked their grains before using them. Traditional cultures often prepared their bread doughs, with or without yeast, and then stored them like that, preparing a loaf and baking it or cooking it over the fire when they were ready. I had met a Middle Eastern gentleman in Pasadena at the farmers market who prepared his breads that way. He didn’t add yeast, they were given a whole week to rise naturally. He claimed that gluten intolerance was a result of our preparing our breads too quickly.
See, grains and seeds have something called phytates. Phytates are great for preserving the seed until the Spring rains come and break down the shells and allow the seed to begin to grow into a new plant. It isn’t so good for eating. The phytates keeps us from getting at the nutrients that are in the grain, and also could cause us to react to it. But soaking allows the phytates to be released by activating the enzymes that are present in the seed that digest the phytates. This is called sprouting and should be done with all grains, nuts, and seeds.
When you can’t soak the grain before you make the flour, the next best thing is to allow the flour to soak and ferment. That’s why sourdough is better…but adding the flour to make it kneadable reintroduced the same problem.
Not to be discouraged, I picked up a new book recently. It’s called Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg, M.D., and Zoe Francois. The method is a semi-sourdough. All ingredients are mixed together in a bin and set out for at least a few hours. The dough is kept more wet than your average dough. Between this and adding vital wheat gluten to the bread, the bread sets up the gluten protein structure without kneading. It uses yeast, but really not a lot, and even the amounts prescribed in the recipes can be cut back.
Once it has set out for a few hours, the dough can be refrigerated for up to two weeks in a container, as amounts for individual loaves or other projects (pretzels, muffins, bagels, buns, rolls, etc.) are removed and baked. It doesn’t have to be as big as mine – really only about 5 quarts is enough if you are not doubling.
While I’ve enjoyed using my Kitchen Aid mixer to mix everything up, I’ve found it is just as easy to mix it up in the container, and you don’t even have to wash the container (if you’re not using a dough with egg), since the remaining dough helps along the fermentation process for the new dough.
When ready for a loaf, just pull some dough out of the container and take five minutes to shape and allow to rest on the counter for an hour and a half or so before putting that bad boy in the oven. No kneading. AT ALL. And as time passes, the flavor of the dough gets more and more sour from fermentation. It honestly is incredible.
The time investment is just that: about ten minutes of prep time once or twice a week to get the dough made, and less than five minutes to shape a loaf before letting it rest and then bake.
And from what I can see, this should be better, because since the flour soaks, the phytates should be mostly removed. The recipes are whole wheat, though some unbleached flour is in some of the doughs. There even are gluten free recipes included, just in case. So that way, I didn’t feel like the cost of the book was entirely wasted, though I tend to go without rather than spend a lot of time risking subpar encounters with substitutes.
I baked the master recipe, and I have to say it was excellent. I nice but not overpowering sour taste to it, the texture was excellent, the crust wonderful. I felt like a bread baking success for once. And it was easy. I’ve baked about four other loaves now from that recipe, and one batch was probably too wet, so the rise wasn’t as good, but the flavor was still wonderful.
A couple of days ago, I tried the pumpkin brioche, but taked it in a regular loaf pan, and it has been a big hit, especially with a slathering of honey butter. I made two loaves from that batch, and can’t wait to make it again because we want to try the recipe they have for using it with doughnuts. That is another plus. Lots of options are offered for the doughs, and with each recipe, the authors list several doughs that will work with it.
There are a few chapters devoted to method, ingredients, and equipment. The chapter sections for types of bread are:
- The Master Recipe
- Whole Grain Breads
- Breads with Hidden Fruits and Vegetables
- Flatbreads and Pizza
- Gluten-Free Breads and Pastries
- Enriched Breads and Pastries from Healthy Ingredients
Best of all, thus far no hiccups. No foggy-headedness, either. And I am enjoying myself.
Now, the authors really aren’t trying to be “Nourishing Traditions” types. They advocate the modern line of low sodium and vegetable oils. There isn’t a word about phytates in the whole book, but from what I see, it fits in rather well, sometimes with only a few modifications. I have increased the salt amount in subsequent batches and I would not hesitate to use butter, lard, or coconut oil in the recipes that call for a fat.
The first two days I had the bread, I was fine. The 3rd day, even though I’d had less bread that day than the first, I got myself “glutened.”
Not sure what the difference was. I’m going to try again, though, because it was really, really good bread. The semi-sourdough flavor is really wonderful.
I’ve noticed that if I’ve been w/out wheat for a good long time, I can tolerate say, 1-2 servings w/ an enzyme helper. But I don’t dare push it, or I’m all glutened-up and have to spend a few days recovering! Argh!
thanks for the information, your blog is very good and interesting