The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Why we are baking our own bread

JerrytheK's picture
JerrytheK

Why we are baking our own bread

RobynNZ's picture
RobynNZ

Thank you for sharing this article.

JerrytheK's picture
JerrytheK

I was jet lagged when I posted this. The article is a 'long read' from The Guardian, a UK paper.

It explains in some detail, why industrial white bread came to be the truly unhealthful garbage it is, and the benefits of properly baked bread, as all of us on this site attempt to make.

It also writes about the efforts to recreate 'ancient' wheat, among other topics.

IMHO, it's well worth the ten minutes or so it takes to read.

Robyn's picture
Robyn

I bake our own bread because commercial bread makes me feel sick (I am not a coeliac or gluten intolerant...)  and 'artisan' bread is obscenely expensive. 

Ejay's picture
Ejay

I was diagnosed borderline coeliac 13 years ago. I needed further tests but poor health meant they decided it was unfair to put me through them. I also have a few medical conditions which affect my digestive health and tests showed that I cannot process sorbitol, an artificial sweetener from which the emulsifiers in commercial yeasts and many flours comes from, and synthetic vitamins including ascorbic acid. While experience taught me that the more gluten containing products I ate, the more pain I was in, I was stubborn enough to resist going gluten free completely. I changed to bread machine at home, but childhood memories of dad baking a cottage loaf every Saturday made me want to try myself. I read articles by Andrew Whitley, and the description of hybrid gluten made a lot of sense to me.  So I am teaching my daughter to bake and educating my housemate on how cheap bread has become and why.  We pay far too little in the UK for food and think artisan bread is expensive. I don't think it really is, we just got hoodwinked into paying 7p a loaf and next to nothing for milk and don't realise the long term damage we are doing to UK food suppliers and our overall economy. 

The main reason though is the nutrients, texture, and taste of bread has been destroyed by industrial factory 'bakers'.