For the past few years baking organic sourdough bread I have had a steady stream of people thanking me for being able to eat bread again. Their primary complaint has always been that “regular” bread gives them anything from serious bloating to stomach cramps and lots more. Why should bread, once the staple food of the “civilised”, do this?
1. Commercial grain is grown in depleted soils which are full of chemicals.
2. The flour is milled to excessive whiteness and the actual nutrients are given to livestock.
3. It is then treated with chemicals (fungicide and pesticide sprays) to preserve it.
4. The flour is then treated with additives (more chemicals) to render it “fit for baking”.
5. Gluten is added to make it strong enough to withstand the rigors of factory production (this gluten is directly responsible for today’s plague of gluten-sensitivity).
6. More chemicals (improvers, stabilisers, etc) are also added at the production stage to enable what is hailed as “wonder bread”.
…and some still wonder why it makes you sick?
This is the end product of the commercial baking process, it is clearly spoiling our enjoyment of food and making us all ill. To regain our health and the pleasure of good bread we need to rediscover what we call the Artisan way of making bread. Today the term Artisan no longer distinguishes an authentically made product, constructed by a craftsperson. To the commercial baking industry, Artisan bread is just a style. But in actual fact, Artisan bread is the defining reality of bread, the yardstick by which bread measures its quality.
1. The Artisan baker uses organically grown grain, which has been proven to contain higher levels of nutrients and more flavour.
2. The Artisan uses only flour, not a chemically reinforced pre-mix.
3. The Artisan doesn’t use fast acting yeasts, but a sourdough culture.
4. Time is a key ingredient in Artisan bread, as the dough is left to mature properly, thus enabling fermentation of the flour, which makes it digestible.
5. In essence, the Artisan baker cares for the customer, something which the commercial baking industry cannot reproduce.
Artisan baking is the way of bread making. An Artisan goes to great lengths to improve, has pride in skill and technique as well as a desire to produce the best product through knowledge and awareness.
The bread we produce has only three ingredients; flour, water and salt. The leavening agent we use is a ferment of flour and water called sourdough.
Sourdough is a polyculture of various wild yeasts (saccharomyces exiguus) and a significant amount of lactobacillus-type bacteria. These yeasts vary depending on the region, and the type of culture maintenance, which depends on the skill of the baker. During this fermentation the proteins (gluten & gliadin), minerals and other nutrients in the bread are rendered more assimilable and digestible. Sourdough is defined by the absence of saccharomyces cerevisiae, baker’s yeast, which is a by-product of the beer industry.
