Mark Bittman and Whole Wheat Sourdough

I recently bought the new book Bittman Bread and have been baking whole wheat sourdough bread about every other day for about two weeks now.

Bittman has an essay in today's New York Times about this topic:

America is no longer a Wonder Bread nation. Gone are the days when bleached, sliced and plastic-wrapped bread from the supermarket was the default. Increasingly, Americans feast on ciabatta, tortillas and pita breads and Instagram their home-baked loaves.

Nutritionally and flavorwise, this is progress; after all, industrially produced white bread is effectively a vitamin-fortified sponge cake. But if we want bread to be as nourishing as it was in preindustrial times, there’s something missing from this picture: whole grain wheat.

Carbohydrates, mostly in the form of grains, have always made up the bulk of humans’ calories, and whole grains are the foundation of a healthy diet. (Grains other than wheat make breads too, of course, and some societies make no bread whatsoever but rely on grains in other forms. But I’m focusing on wheat here.)

We have become a society dependent on ultraprocessed grains, which offer calories without much in the way of nutritional benefits. Huge artisan loaves, organic banana muffins, even the crispest baguettes do not bring us back to the bread most people ate 150 years ago, bread that is made from not much more or less than a dried berry that’s ground into a powder.

If you are interested, you can read the rest of the article on the Times website. The recipe is a bit complicated -- it requires making a sourdough starter and feeding it for three days, then you need to follow a multi-step process over a twelve hour period -- but, really, each step takes about one minute of work so, if you plan it only takes a few minutes  a day to make this bread. So far, I am glad to do it.