Fuck Yeah Artisan Bread

A letter to family members who were given loaves of my bread as gifts for Mother’s Day

About this bread

I baked this loaf of bread shortly before it was shipped in the mail. Its ingredients, by order of weight, are whole wheat flour, water, whole wheat sourdough starter, honey, and kosher salt. It may be different in texture and flavor than bread you have had before. But, I claim, this is what real bread is. 

White flour is, nutritionally and metabolically, inferior to whole wheat flour. It has fewer vitamins, much less fiber, and its glycemic index is closer to that of a can of soda than to fruits or vegetables. Therefore, this bread is unapologetically 100% whole wheat.

My favorite way to eat this bread is toasted and drizzled with honey for breakfast, in thick slices for sandwiches, or served with a spicy, hearty vegetable soup.  It also compliments scrambled eggs or an omelet excellently, as it will not become soggy from the heat and moisture of the eggs.

This bread is naturally leavened, with wild yeast I maintain in a starter. It took time to make – about 12 hours of fermentation at room temperature, and then overnight in a refrigerator. This gives the dough time to develop complex characteristics that don’t exist in typical grocery store fare. If the bread is still in good shape when it reaches you and I’ve done my job, the inner crumb will be moist and tender (not dense), almost custard-like, and the crust will be thin and crisp, with a nutty, sour flavor throughout the bread. It should also have a noticeable, pleasant aftertaste. 

The best part of all, though, is that the recipe for this bread is extraordinarily simple. This is the bread I choose to make and eat because of its flavor and texture, not out of obligation.

Wild yeast takes longer to act than the commercial yeast that became available around the turn of the last century, when bakeries eagerly embraced baker’s yeast products. That is a shift in the name of efficiency and low prices that makes what I feel is too great a sacrifice of outcomes. This loaf of bread is a small act of protest against a food culture that strongly favors convenience over quality and which assumes that quality must be mutually exclusive with affordability.

Food is more than just fuel for the body. It matters, and we should strive for excellence in baking and cooking.

I hope your Mothers Day is an enjoyable one.

Warren Henning

May 2011

goblinbox asked: "How is high-sodium, high-cholesterol food healthier than my 100% whole wheat bread and lentil soup?"

Reducing dietary sodium has very little effect on anything. In a few people, reducing it drastically can marginally reduce blood pressure. HFCS causes hypertension more readily than sodium. (Avoiding HFCS is imperative if one wants to have any kind of waist at all, as it's metabolized immediately into fat by the liver and never even makes it into the blood stream as glucose.) - http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS395US395&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=high+fructose+corn+sweetener+induced+hypertension, https://kindle.amazon.com/post/1D9SWD679PMD7

Confusion about cholesterol in food and cholesterol in the blood stream arose years ago when sections of the food industry decided the public would not be able to understand the fact that the body can make excess cholesterol when the diet is high in saturated fat. - http://healthyeatingclub.com/info/articles/fats-chol/cholesterol.htm, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19082851

Whole wheat flour isn't much slower at turning into blood glucose than white flour. Sure, there are slightly higher trace amounts of several nutrients in whole wheat flour, but one could easily argue it's not enough to make any measurable difference to human health. The issue with refined carbohydrates is not nutritional, but metabolic: these foods are not digested slowly enough so they cause artificial hunger; they throw blood chemistry into upheaval and their over-use causes insulin resistance; insulin resistance is precursor to metabolic syndrome, overweight, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_grain#Flour.2C_glycemic_index_and_insulin_resistance

Lentil soup, however, is, as far as I can tell, perfectly good for you, nutritious, and yummy!

All the fad diets are stupid, as you say, but the results the paleo people are seeing is due, according to my research, not to cutting out all carbs, which is clearly stupid, but to cutting out those few that are metabolized immediately into glucose, thereby causing metabolic syndrome in most people, and illness in many, specifically white flour, white sugar, HFCS, white rice, and potatoes.

Dan Benjamin’s shitty Chipotle food is high-fat, high-cholesterol, high-sodium. It can’t possibly be healthy, regardless of the latest ever-changing opinion on nutrition.

Whole wheat flour is higher in vitamins and fiber, so there very much is a nutritional aspect to it.

How can potatoes be so bad if Ireland was so dependent on them?

Anonymous asked: Have you tried making gluten-free bread? If so, what were the results?

tl;dr summary: I haven’t tried gluten-free bread because I’m very skeptical of gluten-free diets.

I haven’t tried making gluten-free bread. I don’t really understand what the goals are of people who seek out a gluten-free bread flour, because it sounds like asking for a “vegetarian steak” to me: it seems like a contradiction in terms. Gluten development is an essential part of the bread fermentation process and all the conventional instructional material I’ve read about making bread discusses the formation of gluten strands in bread. Gluten-free products are generally much more expensive than equivalent “normal,” gluten-bearing ones and I’m not convinced of the health benefits associated with gluten-free diets for people who don’t have celiac disease or something a qualified doctor diagnoses as gluten intolerance.

If the person who asked this question has gluten intolerance issues and the tone of this reply comes across as insensitive, I want to emphasize that my issue is not with people taking necessary steps to deal with real medical issues but instead people who adopt views about nutrition in an irrational, unquestioning way. Some chefs have questioned whether food allergies are even real or not; I don’t presume to question the reality of legitimate medical issues. I instead want to talk about people who seem healthy enough and voluntarily choose to consume gluten-free products and adopt a gluten-free lifestyle.

Excuse the poorly thought-out rant that follows.

It’s my opinion that the health benefits of “paleo” and other gluten-free diets are conflated with other factors like avoiding processed food and planning meals more carefully. If one were so pathologically inclined, I suspect (but obviously can’t prove) that it would be possible to do a “Supersize Me” type experiment where a person eats processed, unhealthy gluten-free food and observe serious health issues that result from such a diet. I think nearly all of the alleged benefits of paleolithic diets come from the fact that you’re forced to carefully examine what you eat rather than just passively inhaling whatever is convenient whenever your tummy rumbles the way many people do in rich countries nowadays.

It’s hard to find information on gluten-free diets from people who aren’t selling something. I find this highly suspicious. It seems to be everywhere: when I had a short exchange with podcaster and web developer Dan Benjamin on Twitter about gluten-free diets and he linked me to an old article he wrote about it. Not surprisingly, the page had several Amazon affiliate links to books about gluten-free eating. Vendors are all too willing to line up to cater to the needs of people willing to pay something like twice what they would for a given food product and tout the alleged health benefits of gluten-free diets, but if the benefits are real, why aren’t they on Wikipedia’s page about gluten-free food? All it actually links to is a study saying that the efficacy of gluten-free diets is “poor.” I don’t find that encouraging.

I find it strange when Mr. Benjamin apparently tweets about ordering paleolithic diet-friendly food from Chipotle, when the items he recommends have a crapload of sodium and cholesterol in them, a classic nutritional footprint of processed food. How is high-sodium, high-cholesterol food healthier than my 100% whole wheat bread and lentil soup? In a health contest between carnitas from a mediocre restaurant chain and my homemade soup with broccoli, spinach and lentils, I know who I’d back. Benjamin is an excellent technical broadcaster and I greatly enjoy his 5by5 Studios podcasts but I strongly disagree with him on this nutrition issue (an area in which I am not an expert and, as far as I know, neither is he).

Missing from much of the discussion about gluten is history. How could something that has been the bedrock of civilization for thousands of years be so unhealthy, as proponents of gluten-free foods claim? How could “give us this day our daily bread” make it into the Lord’s Prayer? If the price of tortillas rises too high in Mexico, there will be riots. Did someone forget to tell them “gluten is fairly indigestible in all people,” as a doctor was quoted without further citation or justification? (Yes, I know, he’s a doctor at Harvard Medical School, I’m a casual home baker. You Google the doctor’s name and what do you get? Why, information about a book he’s selling. I’m not surprised. Why does this always happen when I search for gluten-free stuff?) Now, by itself it’s a fallacy to claim that “people have done something for thousands of years, therefore it is the right thing to do,” since bad things like the subjugation of women and slavery have gone on for thousands of years. But there’s good reason to believe that the production and processing of wheat became the focal point of most societies for so long because it’s quite beneficial to do so: bread is nourishing and satisfying.

The amount of energy that search engine spammers are devoting to promoting gluten-free products makes it very suspicious to me, basically. It is in the same boat as acai berries, penis enhancement things, and online gambling.

I’m not convinced by the claim about the archaeological record showing declining body stature and generally lower health without further information to support it: otherwise, it’s simplistic post hoc reasoning.

If gluten-free diets are the logical choice for a modern world, how do you implement that in such a way that it is affordable to the majority of people around the globe? How does gluten-free advocacy work when starvation and lack of access to clean water are still very real problems for many people?

I’d like to think I’m rational enough to modify my opinions when presented with solid evidence and reasoned logic that contradicts my existing views. If I find new information that changes the situation, I will retract the above statements, but until then, gluten-free diets to me are for people with celiac disease and fad-chasing yuppies who want to spend $12 on a bag of flour. That’s who I imagine as the main consumer of gluten-free products: thirty-something affluent women who go to their yoga classes not because they want to but because all their thirty-something affluent friends do and they want to fit in; hipsters who are always whining about a region or scene not being as good as it was in the past, who claim to be vegan for health reasons but then smoke cigarettes and drink Four Lokos; people like that.

I am, in short, skeptical of what seem like fad diets that willingly discard the food items that are for the vast majority of the world the basis of their sustenance without putting forth sufficient evidence to support their debatable claims and without addressing what seems like convincing arguments to the contrary.

I’ve talked to my Twitter friend Katie about gluten-free diets (after expressing opinions similar to the above in a more concise form on Twitter) and she took me to task for what she felt was an ableist viewpoint in that I do not have any serious wheat allergy or gluten intolerance, whereas in the past she has had serious problems with gluten and wheat. It was a perspective I hadn’t considered, but I think there are still some very solid points on my side. I don’t think I’ve othered people with celiac disease; the entirety of my disagreement rests solely with fad dieters, because of the condescending way they embrace irrationality the way I think Dan Benjamin does.

I think the burden of proof is on those who want to propose diets that are unquestionably very different from what has been the norm for much of recorded history. I think the gluten-free camp has very much failed to prove its point. I think they are hucksters looking to take advantage of yuppies and trust fund babies with more disposable income than critical thinking ability.

Have I failed to research the issue sufficiently? Am I painting too many separate ideas with one broad brush, revealing that I haven’t thought clearly about what I’m rejecting? I hope not. If I’m full of it and gluten-free is the way to go, seek out the more reputable sources of information (people like Dr. Daniel Leffler who I mentioned above) and make sure you plan your diet responsibly, the same way it’s possible to be healthy as a vegan but not unless you take specific measures to make up for the important nutrients you tend to lose by avoiding all animal products.