As part of our family’s quest for a greener lifestyle, I’ve been baking a lot of bread. Like most people, we love our carbs, but I don’t really like the long list of ingredients on the whole-grain breads we’ve been buying at the supermarket. Sodium Stearoyl-2-lactylate anyone?
We have a bread machine, which takes a lot of the work and the mess out of bread baking. Apologies to bread purists, but we have to take some shortcuts sometimes! I dump all the ingredients in ours and set it on the dough cycle to mix it all up and let it rise. Then I take it out, shape it into a loaf, let it rise again and bake it. Delicious.
There are a few good breads in our collection: a basic whole-wheat, a whole-wheat cinnamon raisin, and our family’s favourite healthy grain bread. But we had a hankering for something different, so before Christmas I got some advice from a bread-baking friend. He suggested sourdough, which I thought would be a great change in the bread department.
I remember my mom having sourdough starter on the kitchen counter when we were kids and her baking it into bread. So I threw together some flour, water and two grains of yeast and let it ferment away. The first batch worked out well, once I scraped off some pinkish stuff that seemed to be growing on top. After four days, it baked up into a couple of loaves of bread that had a tiny sourdoughish flavour.
Then I forget to “feed” the starter — which means to add more water and flour, so it basically shrivelled up over the Christmas holidays. My second attempt turned black so I abandoned that one. I’m going to do some sourdough research and try again, but in the meantime, I’ve got a nice fresh loaf of whole-wheat on the kitchen counter, just waiting to be made into delicious sandwiches for lunch.
And not a speck of Calcium Propionate.
Here’s the recipe:
1 1/4 cups water
1 1/2 tsp salt
1tbsp honey
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup carrots (chopped or grated)
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 cup bran flakes
2 tbsp wheat germ
1 cup unbleached flour
1 3/4 cups whole-wheat flour
2 tsp bread machine yeastAdd ingredients to bread machine in order listed. Choose whole grain setting & back, or choose dough setting to shape your own loaf.
Makes 1 loaf.
Your bread-baking friend currently has some sourdough from Greece happily bubbling away in the basement. I’m remembering to feed it while I wait for the oven to be repaired.
Andrew Potter, in the Rebel Sell, claims baking your own is worse for the environment, but does not explain. (I would guess greater energy use per loaf baked. If you bake 6 at a time, like I do, the argument probably holds less water.)
But is making six loaves of bread using electricity that comes from coal (or that burns a fossil fuel) worse than making one with an oven that uses hydroelectricity?
I don’t know which is worse for the environment, baking or buying bread, but I don’t know if there is anything more satisfying than pulling hot loaves from the oven. It’s just plain good therapy.
Saves on the shrink bill, anyway!