Anyone else here bake their own bread?
Yes, I used to quite a bit. I often used to like to use half wholemeal flour and half unbleached white flour with carraway seeds in. Apparently, brown bread with carraway seeds in it used to be known as Newcastle bread—maybe it was popular there?
However, I tend not to eat bread now for health reasons. It's an interesting fact that as sugar and refined flour started to reach even remote regions of the globe the "diseases of civilization" followed. The same goes for tooth decay. Interestingly, one of the names North American Indians had for whites, besides palefaces, was "blackteeth".
The anthropologist (and explorer) Vilhjálmur Stefánsson did a comprehensive survey of Icelandic skeletal material for Harvard (back in the 20s or 30s I think). In the viking period when there would have been some wholemeal bread a tiny fraction of the teeth had suffered decay; in the mediaeval period when the island was self-suffcient and people had no bread and lived mostly off meat and dairy products there were no rotten teeth at all; in the modern period when white bread came in dental caries was rampant, as everywhere else in the civilized world.
Best from the point of view of health are wholegrains, because they've not been denuded of some of the nutrients in the processing. Wheat seems to be more problematic for human digestion than some other cereals, and rye might be a better option. The other problem is "anti-nutrients"—phytates and the like, basically plant poisons. A l-o-n-g fermentation with yeast will help to break these down, but rushing things in order to get bread out the door for commercial reasons means the yeast doesn't get a chance to do that. Modern commercial bread uses the
Chorleywood process–like much else a British invention—but not one we should be proud of.
Better than yeast fermentation is sourdough fermentation, which utilizes lactic bacteria (and some wild yeast). That's the most digestible, healthiest (and also strongest and most interesting tasting) bread. Yeast-fermented bread that's had a long fermentation is next best. Quick-fermented bread is just junk. Bottom of the tree is unleavened bread. in parts of the Middle East, like Iran, where there's too much bread in the diet and they don't leaven it hypogonadal dwarfism (shrunken b***ocks) is more common than it should be, because phytates in the bread bind up the zinc in the body. (Don't know why they don't leaven it—Perhaps religious reasons: in NW Europe there was always yeast because there was always beer, whereas Muslim countries, of course, are dry.)
Here's what's probably the healthiest type of bread—sourdough wholegrain rye:
http://www.westonaprice.org/food-features/494-sourdough-rye-bread
Does anyone else have an good bread recipes?
Elizabeth David has a famous book at any rate:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Bread-Yeast-Cookery-Elizabeth/dp/1906502870/
How about black Russian bread? This recipe is yeast-risen, because it has quite a bit of wheatflour in it. (There's not enough gluten in rye flour to raise it with yeast). it also has carraway seeds, onion, coffee, and (believe it or not) chocolate:
http://www.russianfoods.com/recipes/item0005F/default.asp
I've never made it, but bought bread similar to that—very intense flavour.
pics om the way, funnily enough it hasnt turned out as the best loaf ive ever made, but it still tastes alright!
