AVOID BEING ENRICHED...

Are you a lover of soft warm fresh baked bread...smothered in softened butter...then flipped over and smothered with more softened butter? Yep, that's the exact way I like it, Bill will tell ya! Sadly, I've come to learn that more and more people have eliminated bread from their diet and that really breaks my heart. Bread has been the constant at more meals, dating back to biblical times, and thanks to modern day industry, a great loaf of wheat bread is disappearing from the table.

My mission with my blog posts is to bring facts to the table and let you decide what's best for you and your family. I don't want to bore you TOO much with a lot of facts, so when writing these posts, I want to make sure to touch on important facts and maybe throw in some food for thought. Today's post is going to be about flour, more precisely, wheat flour.

If you are the grocery shopper for the family then you have undoubtedly seen the shelf system of breads that have lined an entire one side of an aisle at your local grocery store. The breads include everything from bagels and english muffins to buns and major brand artisan breads. But, if you look a little closer, you'll also see a very small section of gluten free/sprouted breads. Even though the section is a lot smaller, it has actually grown in size due to the overwhelming population of those claiming to be "gluten sensitive or intolerant". As I was researching this information I found that 1% of the American population has celiac disease/a true wheat allergy. However, the ranges were different for gluten sensitivity or intolerance (NOT a wheat allergy) which averaged between 6-30% of the population. Gluten is just one of a few proteins in wheat and creates the "sticky/glue" to breads, baked goods, and pastas. And of course I find that so weird knowing that the typical sandwich was/is a lunch staple of growing up as well as bread or pasta being on the dinner table almost every night here in America. How did this all change in 30 years?

To give you a little back story to my research, I mention under my FOOD tab that I had taken to sourdough baking a few years ago. Like many other dieting Americans, I was told several times to avoid processed flour like breads and pastas because of the carb count. Just avoiding processed food altogether was also thrown at me. But I started reading the benefits of sourdough bread and being the obvious bread and butter lover I am, I made a switch to sourdough bread.

The switch was easy in that I found sourdough bread in the bakery area of the grocery store, not the long shelf aisle area. Of course it wasn't cheap, but mentally I believed we were giving ourselves something better and that was my goal in our starting phases of 'food transition'. Each week I was adding a loaf to the grocery cart and Bill was still having a hard time grasping the cost for a loaf of bread and understandably so. It's so disheartening that we have to pay so much for something better for us. That is when I decided to look into baking our own sourdough bread.

Being the research girl I am, I dove into this and watched way more videos than one should, but I didn't want any surprises. I learned sourdough was more beneficial than regular bread because it's a fermented food. It is grown with wild yeast that is literally in our air, and of course the baking process was going to be different than a standard added yeast loaf of bread, and it's going to have a different flavor and smell. As I was learning this, I realized that the store bought bread we were buying wasn't even true sourdough in that it actually had YEAST added to it. Which meant that the yeast added created a faster 'rise' to the bread taking away the fermenting process that gives our bellies the good stuff. Yeast is NOT NECESSARY for baking sourdough bread. And I was paying for nothing!

So, off to baking I went. The process of baking was all but enjoyable. It was chaotic, disappointing, confusing, and heartbreaking at times. I will not tell you how many loaves went into the garbage can, how many loaves became croutons, how many loaves I seriously thought about using as a weapon, and how many BAGS OF FLOUR I went through to achieve a mediocre loaf of bread! It was obvious I did not grow up with a farmer's wife as a mom or a bakery chef, but I refused to give up. When I finally hit the perfect loaf, the clouds really did part and the angels really did sing, I swear!

But as time went on and we were enjoying our successful loaves of bread, my mind was battling itself. How is it that sourdough, even being a fermented food, can be better for us if it's still made with store bought flour....a processed food? I mean, I was buying organic unbleached flour, but it's still a processed food... and so I went back to researching and sometimes I just wish my mind would quit battling itself because on one hand I feel like such an idiot for not knowing some basics and on the other hand I get pretty ticked off when I learn more than the basics.

So here are the facts: wheat flour is as old as time. Grinding it was necessary to eat and digest. This is a simple truth and statement, however the bigger gist or "in a nutshell" fact is this. Wheat grain consists of the bran (fiber, B vitamins, iron, copper, zinc, magnesium, antioxidants, and pytochemicals), endosperm (holds carbohydrates, protein, and some B vitamins and minerals) and germ (healthy fats, vitamin E, B vitamins, phytochemicals and antioxidants). Milling the grain originally was done with stone and then used as is. However, separating the parts after milling (called refining) created a finer flour. The wealthy (starting back to Egyptian times) preferred the finer flour and they were the only ones who could afford this tedious luxury. It soon became a status symbol to have finer flour. Fast forward to the industrial revolution and modern milling. Soon, the once tedious task of separating the milled flour was no longer time consuming and everyone had access to finer flour. But here's where it becomes interesting. People were becoming sick, especially the poor and not well to do in society. Remember, bread was a staple! What they were finding was that these people who once could not afford the finer flour were once living on whole grain milled flour. The removal and separation of all the grain parts were creating a very sick society. And because of this, it became law that milled flour needed to have nutrients added back into it before it was packaged and sold...and we know it as ENRICHED. That is why when you see a package of refined wheat flour, you will see that it is "fortified with thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, iron, and most recently FOLIC ACID. I put folic acid in all caps because it is purely synthetic and isn't found NATURALLY on this planet, yet man created it and put it in food...(my goal is to have another post on folic acid later) Oh, and then they threw in the bleached version. By bleaching the flour with chemicals, the process created a faster aging process which produced a whiter/brighter flour and gave the flour the ability to create fluffier baked goods. The plus to modern day milling is having a longer shelf life to the flour. But it really is the only plus. With the refining process one of the components removed is the germ oil. The germ oil, being a fat, is what becomes rancid spoiling the flour. But as mentioned, refining removes all the nutritional ingredients to a healthy and beneficial berry. (wheat berry is what the grain is referred to), making breads, pastas, and other baked goods contain ZERO natural nutritional value.

So this brings me back to my sourdough. All along I thought I was doing something good, but sadly, I was only doing a very small part of good. Knowing that fresh milled flour won't last long on shelves, I then decided to dig a little more into purchasing a "counter style mill" for our kitchen. I searched out some sources as well for wheat berries and did a little research on the different types of berries. I hope to do a different post on the berries if you all are interested. As for the mill, I was gifted a GREAT mill (the one I wanted!) from our daughter this past November for my birthday! And I've been over here re-learning sourdough recipes with fresh milled flour all over again! I will say, I do believe I've nailed the recipe a lot faster than I thought I would!

The take away: Bread is not the enemy here! Pasta is not the enemy either. I just showed my friend the other day a box of pasta I bought at the grocery store...store brand. I now have a whole grocery bag of different pastas going back to the store to return because the pasta ingredients lists ENRICHED with blah blah blah that I mentioned above. However, I showed her a different bag of pasta I bought at the same grocery store, packaged by the store, but written in smaller print was "PRODUCT OF ITALY". The ingredients read, 'semolina flour' and that was it....no enriched minerals added or anything else. All for a dollar more! READ THE LABELS FRIENDS! Stay away from enriched anything as it is the biggest clue that something has been refined and synthetic nutrients added. Other countries don't practice the same FDA regulated practices here. That sentence right there has always been used to scare us, but in fact, it's become a RED FLAG about our own country for me.

Another key take away is this. The more people understand what's in their food, the more we start to realize that the food may not be the problem, but the processing could be. I truly don't believe that the gluten intolerance is as big as it really is, but that the intolerance comes from the enriched ingredients that are synthetically made and added. For example, my daughter's fiancée is gluten sensitive/intolerant...running to the bathroom within hours of consumption. I asked her several times to have her try fresh milled flour, but they have been unable to get some. While visiting over Easter weekend, I sent them home with a loaf of sourdough bread I made using the fresh milled flour of course. Later that week, they both text me stating she had ZERO ISSUES with the bread! ZERO!!!! WHAT A GREAT FEELING! And in addition, I did a little more research. Bob's Red Mill Whole Wheat Organic Flour advertises as whole wheat. If this is truly the case, it should be fresh milled flour. Fresh milled flour can be stored in the refrigerator to slow the process down of germ oil going rancid. They also put an expiration date on the bag and it is NOT enriched. What I also see is the fat content says 0g. Germ oil is a fat, so I don't know why the fat content says 0g unless it was removed...then it shouldn't be listed as WHOLE wheat....but I'll let you determine if that's something you would like to use. It may be a good start for some who are wanting to taste the difference with whole grain flour. I will say, having the mill and having fresh milled flour is absolutely WONDERFUL. The flavor is amazing and as I'm milling the grains, the flour is coming out warm (from the grinding) and it creates the smell of warm bread!! I mill what I need and the berries are stored in my large glass containers.

I hope this information gives you a better understanding to flour and bread! Please share it with someone you think may need to read it! I am not an affiliate of Bob's Red Mill or of Mockmill (my mill), but you can shop Mockmill HERE!