Eating Naturally – Bread Challenge

A few nights ago, Matte and I watched a series by Jamie Oliver called “Eat to save your life” posted on YouTube.  Basically, Jamie Oliver was trying to show that people have no idea what they are eating anymore in comparison to 50 years ago and have no idea what it is doing to their bodies.  The idea is that all the stuff that is in processed foods can negatively impact your health and even though people have heard the facts they do nothing to change the norm.  This is Jamie’s pitch to get people to care about what they are putting into their bodies.  And for me it worked.  I care.  I don’t want fatty organs.  I want to know what is in my food.

So as I was thinking about what we had just watched, I started thinking about what processed foods are.  There are the obvious frozen dinners, pizzas etc…then I started thinking about bread products.  I looked up recipes online for bread and compared ingredients and nutritional value to the store bought bread on our counter.  The ingredients for homemade bread are generally: flour, yeast (water and sugar/honey) and salt.  The ingredients for store bought bread includes those plus potato flour, salt and a sodium product I cannot pronounce and various other ingredients I cannot pronounce or identify on my own.    As for the nutritional value, it depends on the recipe for the homemade bread so I leave it up to you to take your preferred recipe and compare it to store bought bread.

For further examination of what is in store bought bread, I have included the following link to an article titled “Give Us Our Daily Bread: The Hidden Ingredients of Bread” by Mark Alexander Bain:

http://food-facts.suite101.com/article.cfm/give_us_our_daily_bread

Scary stuff!

This new knowledge has inspired me to make homemade bread for my family.  Store bought bread is no longer welcome in my home!

My plan is to make the bread dough every Sunday, bake one loaf and freeze the dough for the other loaf to be baked mid-week.  Either I will quit by week 3 or I will start learning new bread recipes by week 3…to be continued…