Currently browsing posts about: Bread

Nutrients, a journal that requires authors to pay CHF 2900 ($3400) for their articles, does publish the most amazing studies, ostensibly peer-reviewed (I’ve heard mixed things about its process).  This journal is a source for many of my Monday posts, each more creative than the next.

This is a good one. 

Sourdough Bread with Different Fermentation Times: A Randomized Clinical Trial in Subjects with Metabolic Syndrome. Pérez-Vega KA, Sanllorente A, Zomeño M-D, Quindós A, Muñoz-Martínez J, Malcampo M, Aldea-Perona A, Hernáez Á, Lluansí A, Llirós M, et al.. Nutrients. 2024; 16(15):2380. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16152380

Rationale: The Mediterranean diet, featuring sourdough bread, shows promise in managing metabolic syndrome.

Method: In a double-blind clinical trial, participants randomized to consume either Elias Boulanger^® long-fermentation (48 h) sourdough bread (EBLong) or Elias Boulanger^® short-fermentation (2 h) sourdough bread (EBShort) over a two-month period.

Results. EBShort bread was effective in reducing some inflammation markers.

Conclusion.  The consumption of sourdough bread may offer potential benefits in reducing inflammation markers in individuals with metabolic syndrome; however, longer fermentation times did not show additional benefits.

Conflicts of interest: “I.E. and N.EM. were employees of Elias–Boulanger and received funding from RTC-2017-6467-2 program. They had no role in the collection, analyses, and interpretation of data or in the decision to publish the results. The rest of the authors declare no conflicts of interest.”

Comment: I’ll bet they didn’t.  Sourdough bread is responsible for the benefits of the Mediterranean diet?  That’s news to me.  The bread is healthier if its fermented for a shorter time?  Also news.

The paper does not describe the taste or texture of the bread.

• Ingredients EBLong: whole-grain flour, water, yeast, salt [in other words, real bread].
• Ingredients EBShort: refined wheat flour, water, yeast, salt, wheat gluten, xanthan gum, emulsifier E471, antioxidant E-300 [this is ultra-processed bread].

Thus, the underlying purpose of this study must be to give Elias-Boulanger an excuse to cut down on fermentation time and claim the cheaper, ultra-processed bread is healthier. Count me as dubious, on taste grounds alone.

But isn’t this a great example of marketing research in action?  You can’t make this stuff up.

ADDITION

A reader points out that Nutrients is not alone in requiring Article Processing Charges (APCs) for open-access publication.  Prestigious journals charge much more.

• Nature:  $12,290

• BMJ: £5408 / €6154 / $7159 $7,159 

• Lancet:  $6,000 – $7,000:+

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, during the seventeenth session of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage has incribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity—ta da!—baguette bread.

The traditional production process entails weighing and mixing the ingredients, kneading, fermentation, dividing, relaxing, manually shaping, second fermentation, marking the dough with shallow cuts (the baker’s signature) and baking. Unlike other loaves, the baguette is made with only four ingredients (flour, water, salt and leaven and/or yeast) from which each baker obtains a unique product. Baguettes require specific knowledge and techniques…They also generate modes of consumption and social practices that differentiate them from other types of bread…Their crisp crust and chewy texture result in a specific sensory experience.

The New York Times account points out that this designation comes in the midst of “economic upheavals that include rising prices and the widespread closing of the country’s rural bakeries.”

The decision captured more than the craft knowledge of making bread — it also honored a way of life that the thin crusty loaf has long symbolized and that recent economic upheavals have put under threat. UNESCO’s choice came as boulangeries in rural areas are vanishing, hammered by economic forces like the slow hollowing out of France’s villages, and as the economic crisis gripping Europe has pushed the baguette’s price higher than ever.

* The photo is of Salvador Dali’s Bust of a Woman at MOMA.

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For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

Amy Halloran.  The New Bread Basket: How the New Crop of Grain Growers, Plant Breeders, Millers, Maltsters, Bakers, Brewers, and Local Food Activists are Redefining Our Daily Loaf.  Chelsea Green, 2015.

I missed this when it came out, but Chelsea Green just sent me a copy.  I’m happy to have it, because it starts out by talking about the people behind the Community Supported Bakery (CSB) program I belong to in upstate New York around Ithaca: Stefan Senders’ Wide Awake Bakery and Thor Oechsner who grows and mills most of the grain for that bakery.

Halloran interviewed many local and national people in the various categories of her book’s subtitle.  If you want to know how and why there is now so much fabulous bread available in so many places in America, her book explains all.

Bread lover that I am, I am grateful to all of them.

And how is the fabulous Nathan doing that?  By releasing Modernist Bread this week.

Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya.  Modernist Bread.  The Cooking Lab, 2017.

If you have a spare $600 or so, this 53-pound set of coffee-table books will make you happy.  If you don’t, plead with your local library to purchase a set.

The books are beyond gorgeous—lavishly illustrated and full of the facts, figures, and results of the Lab’s years of experiments on the history, culture, and deliciousness of bread and bread making.

These books beg to be examined—but also used.  That’s why they come with a 6th volume—a user’s guide.  For that alone….

Jim Lahey with Maya Joseph.  The Sullivan Street Bakery Cookbook.  Norton, 2017.

Jim Lahey of My Bread, No-Knead Bread, and Sullivan Street Bakery fame, has produced this marvelous cookbook with his wife, Maya Joseph, featuring all the great foods he serves at Co., his New York restaurant on 9th Ave @25th Street.

Full disclosure: I am a huge fan of both, not least because Maya, who holds a doctorate in political science from the New School, was my teaching assistant in several courses at NYU, and we’ve co-authored several papers:

• Joseph M, Nestle M.  The ethics of food.  Lahey Clinic Journal of Medical Ethics 2009;16(1):1-7.
• Joseph M, Nestle M.  Dialogue: the ethics of food [response].  Medical Ethics 200916(2):7-8.
• Joseph M, Nestle M.  Food and Politics in the Modern Age: 1920 – 2012   In: Bentley A, ed.  A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Age, Vol. 6.  Berg, 2112:87-110.

Maya is a superb writer and I can hear her voice throughout this book.

The recipes are terrific and easy to follow and the book is beautifully illustrated.  You can taste the recipes at Co. and then have some fun with them at home.  Enjoy!

I live part time in Ithaca, New York, where I participate in a bread CSA (a prepaid “Crust Fund”) run by Stefan Senders of Wide Awake Bakery shown here on a recent pick-up day (in space borrowed from a cake shop).

His Mecklenburg-based bakery has quite a story—locally raised organic grains (mostly from Oechsner Farms), fabulous oven, baked to order—and its results are magnificent.

I’m partial to the ciabatta….

Yesterday morning, post-election, I received an email from Steffan Sander, who bakes fabulous hard-crust bread in Tompkins County.  He runs a bread CSA, to which my partner and I happily belong.

I asked his permission to share his message.

Oh! My Dearest Breadfriends,

My heart goes out to each and all of you. Here we have been up till all hours, and then sleeping fitfully. Bakers do that anyway, but last night was different.

We started the bakery a little more than five years ago. Why? Because we were hungry for good bread. Because we wanted to work and play with our dear friends. Because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. But it was more than that.

We built this bakery because we had a vision–of a place that would nurture our community, that would feed us all honestly and with the fruits of our shared soil and water. We saw the bakery as a place where skilled and hard work would be applied to simple materials, and that our work would then feed us all. We envisioned loaves shaped with care, each embodying our attention and love. We imagined those loaves shared and eaten, given away, or simply (if briefly) appreciated as a source of quietness. Nourishment.

There have been days–too hot or too long or too dry or too wet–when all of that has seemed a dream. But this morning, I feel it more strongly than ever. What I saw last night was half a country intoxicated by the pleasure of finally being allowed to openly express anger, resentment, and hatred. It is that awful pleasure that concerns me. I do not think it will subside anytime soon.

There will be plenty of work to do in the weeks and months to come.

For now, I wanted to tell you this about our bakery: we rededicate ourselves to kindness, to generosity, to difference, to complexity, to respect, and to reason. We rededicate ourselves to hard work, to vision, and most of all, to love.

With great and sorrowful affection,

Stef

This is why the food movement matters and is such a source of hope—and pleasure.

Thanks Stef.

Marty Gitlin and Topher Ellis, The Great American Cereal Book, Abrams 2011.

I love cereal boxes, especially ones with egregious health claims, and I have a small collection dating back ten years or so.  I also, courtesy of Kellogg, have facsimiles of the complete set of Rice Krispies, All-Bran, and Froot Loops, dating back to the first year they were produced.   So I’m delighted to find this history of U.S. breakfast cereals, organized alphabetically by era starting in the 1860s, illustrated with pictures of each.  A encyclopedic nostalgia trip!

Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, Beacon Press, 2012.

Bobrow-Strain organizes this books by dream categories: dreams of purity and contagion, control and abundance, health and discipline, strength and defense, peace and security, resistance and status.  White bread does all this?  Indeed it does in this story of how “white bread became white trash.”  He begins by asking, “Is this stuff even food?”  He ends with the whole wheat phenomenon and “yuppie bread.”  This is entertaining history and an example of food studies in action: using food to talk about important issues in history and contemporary society.

Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, Beacon Press, 2012.