I make 9kg of bread every weekend (reasons). so when I wake up I start blooming the yeast: 3268gr of water, 109g of sugar, and about 20gr of yeast. I had to leave for something so I came back two hours later, it smelled amazing, next step is to mix in the salt (218gr) and flour (5440gr) , I usually put the flour first then salt. but this time I put the salt first.
What happened? it fizzled like a soda, like mixing baking soda and vinegar, so many bubbles appeared immediately. I noticed because of the sound it made (was looking at the scale numbers).
Obviously it cannot be a chemical reaction because salt does not really react with anything there, at most it kills some yeast cells before mixing because some parts would have high salt content. there has to be some cool biology involved. And I refuse to ask any AI for that
I agree that it is unlikely to be a chemical reaction. Instead, I suspect you are nucleating bubbles for the dissolved gasses in the solution (think diet coke and mentos).
When yeast is active, it creates CO2 as a byproduct. This is how you get bubbles on the top of your solution when you are blooming the yeast. This gas byproduct is also dissolved into the water as well. Letting it sit for that long would give it plenty of time to completely saturate the liquid (or even supersaturate it depending on environmental changes).
When you throw the salt in, those salt crystals act as a nice nucleation point allowing those dissolved gases to form a bubble and leave the liquid phase. I can’t really speak to how salt behaves differently to flour in this regard, but nucleation rate is proportional to the available surface area for nucleation, and salt crystals tend to not clump up nearly as much as flour, making more surface area accessible for nucleation.
I suspect you already know this since you make so much bread, but, I was always taught that introducing an osmotic shock like adding salt directly to your yeast will slow down the rising/proofing process. So, it would be best to add the flour, then the salt on top, then mix them together to help blunt the osmotic stress on your yeast.
damn, didn’t think about nucleation. am a biologist and got so excited to find some strange biology, was wondering if the salt triggers some burst in metabolism as they die and their enzymes get everywhere. didn’t stop to consider the more obvious answer.
Had to scroll past some random factoids before getting to this answer.
( @ 🍉 Albert 🍉 @lemmy.world )
Better yet : put everything in water except the yeast so the water is already salted water before the yeast expands in it.
If you (or anyone reading) eats a lot of bread, then you might want to watch this video:
“Why Medieval Bread Was A Superfood While Your Modern Bread…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtWokSMmC3QFor anyone making bread, I would guess there are some specific tools you can use to grind the wheat berries without losing all the fiber and nutrients.
OK, but making your own flour is a completely different skill with different tools from baking. I also do 3d printer but I do not have a lab to synthesise PLA… wonder how hard would it be to make at home… going into a quick rabbit hole… short answer, nope.
Also, for context, I currently live in the US, and what they sell here as bread, is something strange. It might be technically bread but it is garbage. they have 100s of bread brands all the same. Extremely sweet (if you make a peanut butter sandwich the bread is sweeter than the filling), it is it took me a year of getting used to it but I still hate it. making bread for me is the only way I can enjoy some bread that tastes like bread.
You should try to find a real bakery. That’s where to get the good bread in the US Those and sometimes higher end/more expensive grocery stores.
there’s only one in my area, it’s not near to me, so not really useful as a mean to get regular bread. I’m Europe I passed a few amazing bakeries on my way to a grocery shop a block away. so I could get excellent fresh bread daily.
Agree with pretty much everything you said, and I have not yet looked in to what would be needed to grind one’s own flour.
Appreciate your entertaining the idea, in any case.
Honestly, I always wanted a milling stone, make proper hummus, (it should be processed in a mill not a blender, but there is probably a couple places worldwide that actually mill it). and making flour or oats with it would be fun, but who can get a milling stone nowadays… fuck, another rabbit hole… so in amazon you can get small stone mills for 200$ but I could not find where to get those big ones they used in the past.
Yeah, good question.
Btw, regarding oats, I recently made oat tortillas / wraps from scratch, and they seemed highly promising, while being outright delicious. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but from what I understand, they’re significantly healthier than wheat and corn.
when it comes to nutrients, their problem is that they have too much nutrients, that’s why we have obesity epidemics. all our basic foods are nutrient bombs that can actually kill some animals.
Even those heirloom varieties are products of 10000+ year long genetic engineering.
I’d argue that the biggest problem with obesity epidemics is the lack of public nutritional awareness, combined with an overload of junk food everywhere, loaded with refined sugar, refined grains, salt… all that. We’re literally poisoning ourselves on a regular basis via ignorance and habit.
People don’t know how to read labels at very basic levels, and think that all calories are the same. And when eating most meals, people are used to getting pleasant glycemic highs, then going in to deficits not long afterwards, making them crave more food; a vicious circle. The guy in the video points out why that wasn’t a problem eating medieval bread, because the fibre content and resistant starches in that bread released energy gradually throughout the day.
not sure if it’s relevant, but high fiber bread. like actually whole wheat bread, tastes terrible compared with modern bread (not American, but for example a baguette or paisano bread). they were popular in the 90s but they quickly devolved into normal white bread with some colour but basically the same bread nutritionally.
Started watching the video and I am calling bullshit whenever anyone talks about the past as having no diseases… no celiac, no diabetes no IBS… yhea total BS. they had those diseases, but most likely they died in infancy and never recorded the reason. also there are written records of diabetes throughout all human history.
There are some nuggets of truth in that video, but so much if it is BS. Like comparing genome sizes (meaningless in plants), or there being raw unpredigested protein in supermaket bread… that is protein, same as any other. stopped watching after 6 minutes.
Would I want good quality bread in store? yhea, but that guy is insane if we follow his rules bread would be incredibly expensive (using low yielding heirloom varieties and more expensive grinding/preparation methods).
There is a reasonable point between whatever american bread is, and that woowoo bs. like no added sugars (or high fructose corn syrup) to make it sweeter, no need for 20 preservatives so the bread lasts for weeks. real bread should last 1 day (fresh amazing) 2 days if you dont mind using it for toast or other stuff, and after 3 to four days it can be turned into breadcrumbs.
If it lasts 2 weeks unrefrigerated? that is not bread
Whatever you may think of the video as a whole, I think the biggest point there is that modern wheat flour strips away most of the fiber and nutrients, not unlike what’s done with white rice, creating an end product that has a high glycemic index. Those things aren’t false, nor the fact that using whole ground flour of any type is undoubtedly healthier.
So he’s not wrong about modern bread being crap, comparatively.
did not say that it was all false, there are a lot of truth in there, but a lot of pseudoscience got mixed up in there. We do need better bread.
Did he mention spina bifida? like when he was mentioning past diseases? Spina Bifida and anencephaly are practically extinct because of fortified bread (caused by folic acid deficiency before a person knows they are pregnant).
Again, we do need better bread, but also lets not go back to the 1400s for low yield grain that will be unaffordable.
So, I’ll take your word on the spina bifida issue, but that’s only one small positive set against a sea of negatives. And from all that I’ve read previously, when artificially fortifying something with vitamins, the body tends to absorb those vitamins vastly more inefficiently rather than if they’re integrated with the original food source. So the fortifying thing isn’t really impressing me at all. And are you actually proposing that the only way to get enough folic acid is via bread? (I doubt you really are)
Again, we do need better bread, but also lets not go back to the 1400s for low yield grain that will be unaffordable.
Well, we don’t need to do any knee jerk stuff. Evidently the video is flawed, but the starting point is still awareness, not unlike how one refines a diet over time with better information.
I’ll be researching this stuff going forward to see what’s possible & reasonable versus what’s not, but simply by cutting down on modern white flour, that should be a big help. Maybe whole wheat flour is the answer here, but IIRC it’s actually not as ‘whole’ and healthy as it purports. *shrug*
the case with folic acid is tricky, because if its sold as a pre pregnancy supplement it’ll be useless as women figure out they are pregnant after the base of the nervous system is developed. putting it in bread for all to eat has no consequences and protects every pregnancy. I’ll like for that one too stay.
my problem isn’t that we put vitamins in there, it’s that we add so many needles preservatives and the final product is only edible if you never eaten bread outside the US.
maybe that’s why there’s a sourdough craze, as it tastes more like bread.
I still think that if you’re relying on fortified white flour to get your folic acid (etc) then you’re in trouble as a society. You shouldn’t have to rely on what’s essentially junk food to prevent disease. Again-- education issue.
Yeah, preservatives are definitely a big issue, absolutely. Stuff like cold cuts and sausages are pretty terrible. The issue with adding vitamins is that it offers the false idea that it’s just as healthy as the original grain, so that’s my problem there.
So are you European? What do you think about the places in the States that offer “rustic” bread, Euro-style bread and so forth? I rarely eat bread anymore, but always make an exception for that stuff, as it’s delicious. And if you think standard American bread is pretty bad (which it is), have you tried Japanese bread, haha?
point being that the extra vitamins are harmless and at worst they are sometimes harder to absorb, which still means more vitamin in the body compared with non fortified. it’s a genuine good thing. preservatives are objectively bad and only benefit logistics and profits. also given the severity of the diseases (often untreatable) they prevent, dismissing them is cruel. yhea, all food should be more nutritious, but having a staple food that prevents horrible diseases? that’s a blessing. similar thing with water fluoridation, but that’s another topic.
moved to the states a year ago. not sure what you mean by “euro rustic style”, I’ll in Michigan and all they have is American sweet bread and sourdough. never tried Japanese milk bread.
