Photo: Katrin Gilger via Flickr.
When I was a kid in the 1980s, a loaf of sliced commercial bread was sold in wax paper wrappers for the princely sum of five rupees. This bread would be eaten in its softest, freshest form, simply slathered with butter, clotted cream, homemade jams or chutneys, or just dunked in Bournvita. As it aged over the next two days in the refrigerator, it would be toasted and slathered with salted Amul butter. But that was pretty much the end of its life cycle. On the third or fourth day, the leftover slices, despite being stored at a cold temperature, away from heat and moisture, would be covered in spots of green mould.
It wasn’t bad bread because it had a short shelf life; in fact, it was probably much healthier (despite being all white flour bread) than the stuff we buy and eat today. Thanks to the recent study conducted by the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi, we now know officially what we always suspected. There are so many chemicals in our bread today that the loaf doesn’t spoil for weeks in the refrigerator. At best, it goes dry and hard, but you won’t find a speck of green mould on it. Improvers, stabilisers, enhancers, terms indicating added gluten, potassium bromate and potassium iodate that belong to a chemistry laboratory but appear on the ingredient lists of commercial bread packages ought not be there in the first place. To paraphrase food scientist Michael Pollan, if food contains ingredients your grandmother won’t recognise, then it’s probably not suitable for consumption. A loaf of bread is not just a loaf of bread if it is made of anything but flour, water, salt, yeast and sugar.
Because gluten has been getting a rap recently, a lot of people seem to think that bread should not be consumed by the gluten-intolerant at all. However, research has shown that consuming breads made out of natural yeasts (sourdough breads) or breads made using the full grain and without chemical additives are much easier on our digestive systems and are better tolerated by the gluten-averse. It is the other ingredients that get added to commercial breads that complicate the matter. The addition of extra gluten to flours in order to increase the volume of bread is a common commercial practice that leads to its excessive consumption.
But there are also problems with the flours we use. Not until very long ago, the “white flour” that we bought at the local grocer was not really “white.” It was a creamy off-white, suggesting that it was a derivate of a fawn coloured grain such as wheat. However thanks to heavily bleached flours, our breads now look like they’ve been to the laundry and are all set to be starched and ironed. The irony is that white flour just looks better; it’s less tasty and is robbed of fibre. Even supposedly wholewheat breads often contain a good percentage of white flour and a generous amount of brown food colouring. When I was studying bread making 20 years ago, we were taught to add caramel to a brown bread recipe! It’s tougher to work with wholewheat flour. As a result, a lot of commercial bread companies use a large percentage of maida and add caramel to make it look brown.
My argument is, if we can make chapatis, puris and parathas at home, why can’t we make a loaf of bread or a tile of pao or pizza bases at home? They require the same ingredients and almost the same technique with the addition of yeast, either a commercial yeast or wild variety. (Think about wild/natural yeast or what is commonly known as sourdough like you think about fermenting idli/dosa batter). Commercial yeast is something you can buy off the shelf. It comes in bricks of fresh yeast stored in the freezer or as packs of dried yeast that resembles poppy seeds.
Sourdough starters, on the other hand, have to be cultivated and maintained on a regular basis. You combine flour and water and allow the yeasts naturally present in the atmosphere to enter this mixture. You then let it develop over a few days, refreshing it until it achieves a regular cycle of high and low yeast activity. A starter made thus is natural yeast that can be used in bread making in place of commercial yeast. However, this is slightly more challenging to do. Once you understand how to cultivate or use the yeast, all that remains to be done is to knead the dough, an art that I firmly believe is entrenched in our DNA.
Here are my two main tips for starting off on bread making routine at home:
• Get your wheat flour milled (this will also give the local chakkis a reason to survive). Any local mill is fine as long as you buy the wheat yourself. Punjabi chakki atta from the likes of Roshan Punjabi Atta is quite dependable.
• Invest in good quality instant yeast or learn how to cultivate a sourdough starter. Places like Foodhall and Arife stock instant yeast. Alternatively, you could pester the local pao wala to sell you small 20 gram packs of fresh yeast, which you can finish off in one recipe.
Saee Koranne-Khandekar is a Mumbai-based food writer and consultant and the author of Crumbs: Bread Stories and Recipes for The Indian Kitchen. She blogs at myjhola.in.