we don't eat much bread. It wouldn't be worth our while."
We were discussing bread and breadmaking and one of those present dismissed both bread and breadmaking as being of just that much importance.
I make our bread - with the help of a bread machine. The Senior Cat prefers what he refers to as "real bread". He does not consider "cheap, square, white sliced" to have any food value at all. I suspect it has considerably less food value than what I make or than some of the other breads available in the supermarket.
The supermarket I shop in does have a good range of bread. Some of it is the "cheap, square, white sliced" sort but there are breads as well, wholemeal, full grain, dark rye, light rye, fruit, flavoured etc etc. You can buy a cheap loaf for a couple of dollars (less on special or if it is "yesterday's loaf") but the better breads can be as much as three times that price.
I have watched and the vast majority of people buy pre-sliced bread in plastic packets. It is convenient. It makes sandwiches for school lunches. It makes toast. It has a soft crust and spongy texture. It does not have a lot of flavour. It was what most people want. They see bread as an addition or a base. It is not seen as a food in itself. I used to be "the staff of life". Now it is seen as "carbohydrate", something to be avoided.
I make ours from a variety of flours but largely from whole meal. I add other things, particularly seeds like sunflowers and pepitas or nuts like walnuts. They are our basic everyday loaves. Sometimes I will make something special. It might have dried fruit if it is sweet or olives or cheese if it is savoury. Yes, it is still largely carbohydrate but we need a certain amount of carbohydrate and I like to consider this sort is better for us than some other forms of carbohydrate.
The woman who made the comment about bread was eating a commercially made biscuit with her coffee. It was not a bad biscuit in itself. There are plenty of others with a much higher calorie or kilojoule content but these are high enough. The biscuits are convenient and require no preparation. They taste good. It was her second such biscuit.
I suspect she sees the biscuits as "just a little snack" although they probably have more calories or kilojoules than a slice of good bread. No wonder they are so tempting!
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2 comments:
When you consider how the white sliced is made...the Chorleywood process which aims to get as much water into the flour as possible...I wonder we class it as bread.
I don't think commercial bread is worthy of the name - it has some cereal in its ancestry, but it is so altered that it hardly qualifies as a food.
When my children were small nd had bottomless pits for stomachs, I used to work on the principle of: give them their balanced diet, then fill any holes with homemade cake. Yes cake. The stuff I made had far less sugar than anything in the shops, and the eggs were all home grown. It was quite an exercise working out how to get the recipe right when I was using bantam eggs, which are apprizimately half the size, and even more complicated when it was pheasant eggs.
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