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Fresh-Milled Bread Movement Might Make America's Bread Great Again
By
Rebecca Fishbein
Published May 21, 2016
Modified May 21, 2016
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By
Rebecca Fishbein
Published May 21, 2016
Modified May 21, 2016
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Bread is a most wonderful food, as evidenced by the fact that it is responsible for things like sandwiches and also more sandwiches. Unfortunately, Bread has also been demonized by people who claim it is "bad" for you, thanks to some so-called science that says refined grains like white bread have little nutritional value and contribute to weight gain and blood sugar spikes. Science is mean, even when it's right, and though whole grains are much better for you than the white stuff, but they are just not as GOOD. But, it appears bakeries countrywide are starting to produce bread made from fresh-milled flour that is as tasty as it is non-threatened to our bodies, and now it's not only cool to shove baguettes in your face, it might actually be beneficial to your health. Hooray!
The Wall Street Journal reported this week on the hip whole grain revolution, and how it might actually. Adam Leonti, the owner of , Brooklyn Bread Lab in Bushwick, claims he lost 15 pounds by eating sourdough bread made from wheat he milled himself at the facility. "There’s fiber in there, which is missing from peoples’ diets altogether,” Leonti told the WSJ. "You have all these enzymes that are alive and volatile, which are extracted from white flour to make it shelf stable. Those are the things your body is searching for to make digestion happen, to make nutrition happen."
What Leonti's saying here that's so important is that not only is bread okay to eat, but your body actually needs the nutrients these freshly milled whole grain breads provide. This doesn't apply to breads made from white commodity flour, which, sadly, is where most of our bread comes from. It's also not the same thing as the whole wheat stuff you'd find at the supermarket, which are made by mixing white flour with wheat bran, minus the healthful wheat germ, which can hamper shelf-life.
"Wheat is incredibly nutritious, but when you mill in such a way that you remove the bran and germ, you’re losing the micronutrients that we need the most,” Dr. David Killilea, a nutritional biochemist at the Children’s Hospital of Oakland Research Institute, told WSJ. "When you compare what’s removed from wheat to make commercial flour, it tracks pretty well with the nutrients that are most deficient in the U.S. population.”
The industry hasn't overwhelmingly caught on to the fresh-milled bread movement, so don't start carbo-loading quite yet. But still, while an in-house bread milling operation sounds like it could be found in the back of an artisanal mayonnaise shop, anything that un-demonizes bread is welcome indeed.
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bread is wonderful
i love bread
in defense of bread
Rebecca Fishbein
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