posted 15 years ago
If everyone will bare with me longer i have more to say about types of flour as Bunkie Weir talks of, home milled bread.
They used to mill flour crushing it between two round stones moved by the river or wind in wind mills or water mills, as everyone knows, the first ecological energy machines. When they changed from this method flour was milled between metal rollers, i should check this out, and then the bran got shot out and separated from the flour while they rolled it, while flour milled with stones, the bran only got separated from the grain when it was sieved after being milled if they wanted white bread flour.
The problem with the new system was that the part of the grain with most vitamins in it, the germ, gets lost with the bran. They separate some of the wheat germ to be sold to health food shops or returned to white bread flour to make whole meal flours or breads but most of it goes to feed live stock.
If you know about seeds there are two sides to the inside of a seed that look like fat white leaves and a small bit in between that is the part of the seed that germinates. that sends up a shoot and down a roots feeding on the two swollen leaves that make up wost of the seed. The bit that shoots is the germ.
Wheat germ has vitamin E, folic acid, vitamin B9, thiamin, zinc, magnesium, essential fatty acids and fatty alcohols, in it. Bran has dietary fiber and minerals i am not sure that the thing i read on fiber did not include those things that wheat germ has in it and so it left me ignorant about what was particular to bran without wheat germ.
They also lost calcium when they started roller milling because they were no longer using stones to mill with which left a certain amount of calcium in the bread, that is if they used a stone with some calcium in it.
Bread is basic of western diet; a loss in its nutrient qualities is a serious loss. Didn’t the French revolution start because of a rise in the price of bread? The British government made up for the loss of nutrients making laws about putting calcium in bread and replacing the vitamins lost in the milling.
At first they subsidized whole wheat flour brown bread in an effort to support the most rich in nutrients type of flour an dpeople bought the cheaper loaves but as the bakeries simply returned the bran to the white flour but not the wheat germ or simply colored the white bread to make a very light type brown loaf, with caramel subsidizing brown bread did not resolve the problem fo the low nutrient quality of the new bread. So then they had to make a law obliging bakers to replace the vitamins and nutrients lost in the bread, be it only with vitamins and minerals fabricated in the laboratory. Natural folic acid is healthier than lab produced folic acid.
It seems that white bread is bleached to make it white with chlorine,in England this was illegal in France to fill the demand for white flour. Chlorine also matures the flour making it easier to mix for big bakeries. Bread can have emulsifiers and preservatives and stabilizers and yeast stimulating preparations as well as the normal ingredients, in England, when my book on bread was written by the cookery book writer Elizabeth David twenty five years and more ago. Here in Spain even in special bread shops it can contain soya flour. My book says that one problem is the bakers aren't obliged to give you all this information.
Soya can be considered good in vegetarian diet because if you combine eating pulses, lentils, beans, chickpea’s etc. with eating grains, you get all your amino acids, pulses have proteins with some of the amino acids that are found in the meat and that you need to grow tissue or recreate it, to mend your body and grains, rice, wheat and barley, etc., others and if you eat the two together not necessarily in the same meal but in the same day you get all the amino acids you need as you also do if you eat meat.
The problem is i like a plate of beans and i like the taste of bread but do I want the two mixed? I think unless I am starving I would rather my breed was just made of wheat flower. Do we need bread that covers all our amino acids needs when we have problem with over feeding which seems to be so deadly in the West? Meat is cheap we don't need bread with all the proteins in it that meat has. As an ex-vegetarian who wants to return to it being one I would also say, wouldn’t a pot of lentils accompanied by a really nice grain floured bread be better than bread with soya flour in it, unless we are starving. agri rose macaskie.