Your Daily Bread…

Mmmmmm, yummy!  Everybody loves bread.  When I had to try a gluten-free diet, I could find a suitable alternative for everything from pasta to crackers to breakfast cereals…  But NOTHING replaces a good old-fashioned slice of wheat bread.

Personally, if I make a sandwich, I tend to shy away from white bread.  I just don't like the taste or the consistency that much, and I certainly am no fan of the play-dough smell and consistency of some nationally known white breads.  Give me a nice soft honey-wheat, or if I'm having something really hearty, a multi-grain.  Bread with flax seed can have some great health benefits as well, and it tastes…  GREAT!

If I'm going to grill a sandwich, well, I have to say I'd go heartier still.  I love a good seeded rye, or a pumpernickel.  But most often, I'd split the difference and go for a rye-pumpernickel swirl.  Aaaah, the best of both worlds there!  Makes a stunning grilled cheese, with or without bacon, ham, or tomato!

For dipping in soups or crafting a nice sub (hoagie), we tend not to have any decent hoagie rolls around here in the Washington DC area.  I won't fault our local bakeries -- my best attempts have, to coin a phrase, fallen flat.  It must be the water or something, but trying to get that chewy texture with the nice crust, seems never to work around here.  I have to substitute a baguette, or a long sourdough.  But it's not such a horrible thing!

The main problem that I have with bread isn't that I'm a carbo-phobe.  It's not even that the wheat in bread makes it difficult for me to properly absorb vitamins, minerals, and some of the prescription medication I'm on.  No, the problem I have with bread is much scarier:  MOLD!

Some studies suggest that about 98% the pre-packaged bread we get in the grocery store contains mold.  I don't really find that so surprising.  When you think about it, those loaves might be a week old when we buy them.  Maybe even more.  And a typical household might keep that bread around another week.  How do we expect 3-week-old bread NOT to have mold???

But this raises another question:  How does 3-week-old bread not go stale?

The answer to this is disturbing to many, and we need to examine the additives in our breads.  Next time you go to the grocery store, take a pair of those magnifying reading glasses with you, so you can check out the labels.  They certainly don't make it easy for you to figure out what is in your bread.

If you look, you will see such things as potassium bromate, calcium propionate, sodium stearoyl lactate, and L-cycteine.  Please ignore the ascorbic acid -- that is basically just chemical-speak for vitamin C, and hardly anything to get your bread bag in a bunch over.  The same goes for dextrose, really.  It's just a sugar, and it's usually found in a small enough quantity as not to be a worry.

So, my chemically-impaired friends…  What is potassium bromate?  It's an additive used as a dough conditioner, and if the bread you buy is cooked properly, it should not be present in your loaf.  The problem is, potassium bromate is illegal in Europe as a food additive, as it is a known carcinogen.  Do you really want your bread baked with a known carcinogen, even if it's unlikely you will wind up eating it?

And calcium propionate is a mold inhibitor.  It's purpose of course is to kill mold, however it is also toxic to humans.  Bakers working with this substance wear masks and gloves to protect from widespread allergic reactions.  And this ingredient is believed to promote restlessness and sleep disturbances in children.  All that, for something that we shouldn't need in our bread, if it were say, only one week old before we consumed it!

Then there are sodium stearoyl lactate, and L-cycteine, used as emulsifiers and "flour treatment agents".  There really isn't a lot of evidence that either of these additives are unsafe, HOWEVER both are most inexpensively derived from animal fats.  This might well come as a shock to my vegetarian friends…  Your bread-aisle bread can in fact be labeled as vegetarian and still contain ingredients derived from pork or beef!  How is that so?

There could be even worse additives in your bread, such as ammonium chloride or potassium iodate, both of which come to your bakery with a Materials Safety Data Sheet because they are (a) harmful if swallowed (!!!) and known skin, eye, and respiratory irritants.

And in general, you want to avoid breads that have soybean oil, corn oil, cottonseed oil, safflower oil and sunflower oil in their ingredients.  These oils tend to be high in Omega-6 fats that compete with the Omega-3's you want in your diet.

This is a lot of food for thought.  So, what do I do INSTEAD of buying this loaf-of-all-chemical-irritants at my local grocer's?  First off, look instead of in the bread aisle, to the bakery aisle.  Most of the time your grocery store will carry some really lovely alternatives to that goo you have been buying.  But be sure to read the labels carefully!  They too might contain some of these additives above.

Another thing you can do is to visit a local bakery.  Ask if the dough is prepared on-site (a very good thing!), and to see the ingredients for some loaves that interest you.  Again, read carefully!

And now you are thinking:  "All this is great information, but these other breads are going to cost more AND go bad faster.".  Why, yes they are, and that is exactly the point!  If they DON'T go bad or stale quickly, you are eating GUNK!  But seriously, if you are worried about this, buy the more expensive loaves and then freeze them in half-loaf portions.  In this way you can inhibit both mold and staleness without funky chemicals, and make sure you aren't throwing away good money with bread gone bad.

Of course, you could always go "old school" and bake your own breads at home.  But if you are like me, this is going to lead to even more cost, when you throw one of every three loaves out for some heinous defect…  And in the long run it's going to increase your frustration/stress level, as baking decent bread is quite labor- and time-intensive.

Have fun chewing over all this information, and I hope there is a healthy loaf in your immediate future!