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1/ I’ve been baking bread for a year now and I’m grateful I’m a lot more comfortable and confident with what started as a hobby interest and evolved into a weekly ritual for me. I’m self taught (thank god for the library), and after a year I feel like my mindset towards bread has
2/completely changed. There is something quietly and intensely magical about bread and its alchemical process that turns something inedible (raw flour) into a staple for all. We see it everyday, but as I learned more I saw how little I knew; also, I learned that bread has changed
3/ This is my first thread ever, so bear with me, but I’ve had these thoughts for a while and I think more of us should know about it and that it affects our general health even. So, bread has changed. Bread has been industrialized. It’s been made to fit a standard (Fast, White)
4/and culture has been manipulated by large industries to convince us that its wonderbread (w bleached and stripped of major nutrients flour, made w lots of commercially made fast acting yeast) and that bread should be like other commodities being pushed. However, before this,
5/bread had only been made with naturally leavened yeast — when we refer to a sourdough bread, this is what we mean, — that is cultivated and cared for often daily. Bread made this way takes relatively longer, but what happens is simple: a longer fermentation. Bread, at its heart
6/is a fermented food. It relies on our symbiotic relationship with yeast, which pre-digests the flour and opens up the nutrients for our own bodies. Meet Bunny, my own starter (a term for the maintained yeast), she does a lot of hard work and I try to feed her well.
7/A lot more goes into bread making, choosing the flour is important for the nutrition as well (when you eat bread, you’re mostly eating flour), and commercial yeast isn’t completely the beast (I use it in small amounts), but what I feel like we’ve lost is the appreciation for
8/time. We’ve separated ourselves and created a system which overproduces and doesn’t truly even feed us or our soul. We get frustrated when bread takes longer than 2 hours to take (let alone 12-24), but if we want to make better bread our missing ingredient is truly that, time.
9/That’s probably enough for now, please lmk if you have any questions (happy to flesh out a point). I do want to say a lot of local bakeries are going to be hurting if not gone after this pandemic, and it’s them who are often making bread like I try and make, but when shit rolls
10/I hope u see that it’s okay to take that extra step and just go hit a good bakery, spend the extra few bucks and the extra time to genuinely appreciate and thank bread, and also the people here and now who who get up early to put it on our tables everyday. Fin.
