So, OK I'm hooked. Its official! Organic bread is brilliant and I love every loaf my dear SO makes for us at home in our Kenwood and Delta break makers.
He makes regular white and a white "French" bread; wholemeal and half white and wholemeal; garlic bread; seeded bread and....... new mixes at the testing stage!
His bread is gorgeous, crusty, chewy, moist and all with that delightful crumb. All with organic flour, of course, which I insisted on, coming home from my hols. in Victoria, Australia, where we only munched organically speaking!!!
It's a little more costly to buy but the benefit of "going organic" far outweighs the cost which is negligible compared to the greater benefit for the human digestion.
For me, with a slight insensitivity to wheat, it's blooming marvellous, for its constituent parts give me no horrible side-effects, which I've been suffering practically all my life. l I think even my father had similar problems but, then my grandparents would probably have not thought his bread eating difficulties worth bothering over! The common-sense approach to such matters.
Milk too is a problem for me and, quite likely, my father also. That of the Lactose content of regular milk, which I understand, goes hand-in-hand with wheat intolerance. I consumed vast quantities of both foods from birth. Our diet was full of bread and bread products and uses. Milk was taken on board with great enthusiasm. I loved that cool, creamy taste, the chilled, iced milk of frosty mornings, the Blue Tit pecked off foil cover, the ancient milk pot an elderly family member had lovingly kept, and used as a flower pot; that is until I caused it to become lost. Life is awful sometimes, hey?
NB - the creamy taste of frosty milk only comes after a thorough shaking of cold bottled contents!!!
Bread and milk, two of our most basic, elemental foods! How strange it is that these two, either singly or together, so often wreck havoc, in so many ways, for countless people?
Now the problems of eating two much wheat, which must have been always difficult, and the resultant build-up of gluten, from every member of the cereal family, has been known of for simply ages; but I have the feeling, as with other modern things, the gluten problem has become more quickly widespread around the globe, wherever societies have found the need to produce more and more easily made wheat-based foods. Plus the contemporary "apparent" need and desire for ever-ready, accessible, easy to buy, cook and eat TV-food on a tray on ones lap! Wouldn't you agree???
Perhaps the "slow-food revolution" is the answer to the awful modernity of our society - aka Us - as with the slow home-production of our daily bread; perhaps even the use of bread makers is taking things a bit too far, hey? But somehow I don't think the use of such modernity is really the cause of any problem but that of the possibility of eating too much bread, coupled with the lack of exercise some of us take!!!
Ah well, I think bread was the matter in hand, not philosophy! So, organically speaking, we should get ourselves back to the heart of the matter in hand ie our daily bread and the flour from which it is made, the organic heart of our existence.
Reduce the amount of gluten in your gut and see how well you feel!
So, buy the best organic flour you can afford, make your own bread - there's masses of advice and recipes ready to find online, in books and anywhere you care to search. Why not try with the first medium which comes to hand and go on from there until you find your favourite answer and go with it!
If I can do it, so can you. Just keep on with the research, the making and baking (and eating trials) and see how far you can go!
Happy kneading...!
Daisy xxx
