Healthy Bread Recipes

From
Thom's Recipe File

Healthy baking starts with all organic ingredients both dry and wet.  I have changed my baking to include sourdough in almost everything I bake.  Why do I use sourdough? 

Commercial baking yeast is a single kind of organism that belches a lot of gas really fast and transforms grain into something that's even less good for you.  Sourdough is two organisms, wild yeast and bacteria, in symbiosis.  Together they transform the grain to make it more healthful, more digestible, and also resistant to getting moldy or stale.  Many people with wheat allergies or yeast allergies have no problem eating real sourdough.  And It's free!

Here is a definition of "Natural Leaven":  "Wild yeast, or multi-micro flora are the natural air-borne ferments that are generated or seeded in a dough left exposed to a clean and cool atmosphere under specific conditions of moisture and temperature and the exclusion of larger specimen.  Within that fertile medium, lactic bacteria of the various beneficial types are found: B. Pastorianum, B. Delbrucki, B.Ternoas well as saccharomyces such as S.Pastorianus, and S. Cervisiae.  This type of microflora consumes little energy and multiplies quite slowly.  Its growth duplicates the cycle of human breathing and that of wheat embryo germination.  Wild yeast also naturally enriches the bread, due to an additional development of nutrients by the beneficial enzymes and ferments."

With sourdough, you are keeping and feeding a population of friendly yeast and bacteria, called a culture, or a starter.  The population rises and falls, depending on where you keep it and what you feed it.  When you make a load of bread, you are carefully managing a population explosion.   The sour flavor comes from chemicals made by the yeast and bacteria, and when it gets really strong, that does not mean the sourdough is strongly active, but that it is depleted, that the population has already eaten its food and collapsed.

To make sourdough you only need flour, water, a glass jar, and a glass bowl.  I have a very simple sourdough starter recipe that I will share with you here.  I use a quart jar to put one cup flour and one cup water loosely cover it and let it sit in the kitchen for two days.  Walla you have your starter.  The recipe is to the right under recipes.

What can you bake using sourdough?  How about waffles, pancakes, tortillas, pie crusts, biscuits, soda breads, pizza, cinnamon rolls, pan bread, cornbread, and sourdough breads.  I use sourdough for all these.

One of the main values of sourdough baking is digestibility.  Bread and grain-based diets, especially at the beginning, give the illusion that they do not readily digest.  Natural leaven bread, because of its inherent beneficial ferments, slowly recreates the population of friendly lactobacillus digestive bacteria in the absorption tract.  The end result is a recovery of digestion and proper elimination by the effective action of friendly bacteria.  Natural leaven bread provides more stable nutrition than that obtained mechanically by non-fermented (and thus non- pre-digested) bran and other raw or cooked roughage diets, since these only succeed in physically abrading and irritating the colon.