Bread Wheat

Archive for February, 2007

http://www.ManjulasKitchen.com INGREDIENTS: Recipe for 10 Puris: 1 cup whole wheat flour 1/2 cup water 1/2teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon oil Canola Oil to fry Send comments to manjulaskitchen@yahoo.com

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Don’t Be Scared! Bread Won’t Bite!So you’ve attacked many problems in your kitchen and solved them, and you’re feeling adventurous. Maybe you have an issue with what people are putting in your food, and what you are putting in your kids. Maybe you’d like to be a little more self-sufficient. All of the above  could be true about you. What to try next?What about a couple of good loaves of whole wheat bread? If you’ve never been in a kitchen when bread is just getting done in the oven, you have missed out on a whole spectrum of culinary experience. Fear not! Your problem is easily solved. While it’s a time consuming process, nutritionally and for taste reasons it is completely worth it. Also, the time is mostly spent not actually in the kitchen, but letting your ingredients rest and rise. So where to start? The first thing to do when making real whole wheat bread is to get the right ingredients. Nearly every grocery store sells good whole wheat flour nowadays. Personally I grind my flour straight from the whole grain, but that is an extra step you need not take when you begin to learn breadmaking. (It’s definitely worth it, from the perspective of both taste and cost, so it might be something to keep in mind. All you really need is a blender and a small-holed sieve. Check my content page within the next few days to find my description of how I grind my flour.)

Not All Wheat Bread is Good for YouSo let me go on record as saying that I like Wonder Bread! I liked it as a kid and I enjoy it now. I hardly ever eat it, because they don’t sell Wonder Bread it in Italy. Heck, if I want bread I’ll get a fresh loaf or two at the local baker. But every month or so I’ll drive about four  hours to the nearest American military installation and I’ll pick up a loaf of Wonder Bread for the sheer joy of watching it float out of my hands. I never quite understood what makes Wonder Bread so soft and mushy and maybe its better that way. But on my last trip to the base commissary, I was quite surprised to find Wonder Bread WHEAT competing for space; side-by-side the conventional white, soft, fluffy Wonder Bread of old.That’s a good thing, right?While the new whole-grain white bread looks and tastes the same as Wonder Bread’s regular stuff, it is claimed to have three times the fiber and is made with an albino wheat that is void of the harsh taste commonly found in whole red-wheat flour. Moreover, whole-wheat and whole-grain flours contain all three parts of the wheat kernel, including the bran, the germ and the Starchy endosperm. According to the chief marketing officer for Wonder Bread maker Interstate Brands (www.interstatebakeriescorp.com), Wonder Bread’s 100 percent whole-grain alternative is meant to “…distribute all the goodness and health benefits of whole grain, without giving up the benefits of white bread.” I’ve since learned that while some nutritionists praise this new, “healthy” alternative, others claim the long list of dough conditioners necessary to give the bread its distinctive soft, mushy texture indicates it’s hardly bread at all. For example, Marion Nestle — a nutritionist at New York University — calls it “stealth health.” Comments Nestle, “…Bread is flour, water, yeast, salt. Period. Wonder Bread WHEAT has something like 20 other ingredients…”I’m thinking that’s not a good thing.