Daily Archive

Give Us Our Daily Bread #1 by cobalt123, on Flickr

Since embarking on a diet of traditional, local foods, bread and I have had a parting of ways. I started out trying the sourdough recipes in Nourishing Traditions, but my family and I agreed, this was not for us. We can handle sourdough very occasionally, if it isn’t overly sour or heavy, but as a frequent visitor at our table, it was not going to work.

I went to work researching recipes for soaked bread and carefully tried each. We were not impressed. They tended to be heavy and sour like sourdough. I thought perhaps sprouted wheat would work better, but the sprouting process made the wheat taste distinctly different: better, I thought, my family disagreed. Sprouting also seemed to reduce some magical power of the bread (gluten?) that made it rise, so our sprouted loaves were not light and soft.

Coconut flour works marvelously for pancakes and the occasional dessert loaf, but for a daily sandwich-and-toast bread, the family voted a resounding no.

So, the entire time I’ve been cleaning up our diets, I have been buying bread. Organic, mass-produced and not local for John; sprouted and local but not organic for the rest of us. Despite having organic wheat in the house, a wonderful mill in the cupboard and a bread machine on a shelf, I have resorted to paying $5 a loaf for someone else to bake my bread.

Oh, sure, I could point to the yeast and say my reason is the lack of GMO-free yeast, but I know for a fact my “crunchy grocer” carries Rapunzel organic GMO-free yeast. I could blame my desire to follow a more low-carb diet, but the rest of the family doesn’t participate in my low-carb leanings.

The truth of the matter is: bread is my Achille’s heel, my nutritional disconnect. It’s the one item my family refuses to budge on: the one food we insist on eating even knowing it contains possibly genetically modified grains, unhealthy fats, fattening carbs and travels too many miles to get to us. I doubt I can get John to enjoy homemade bread for sandwiches, but I know the rest of us would. Just the wonderful smell of bread baking is enough to jumpstart an appetite. But, therein lies another problem. Will baking fresh bread from freshly ground wheat destroy my resolve to eat low-carb?