Читать книгу Bread Matters: The sorry state of modern bread and a definitive guide to baking your own - Andrew Whitley - Страница 25

Industrial bread is made far too fast.

Old-time bakers knew that if you left dough to ferment for a long time in the right conditions, ‘acids’ would ‘ripen’ your mix and produce a moister crumb and better keeping quality, as well as that indefinable bread flavour. In Germany, Poland and Russia especially, the cultivation of lactic and acetic acids in traditional sourdough fermentation was valued for the flavour and digestibility of the local (mainly rye) breads.

Most of us are rather amazed that mixing flour, yeast and water produces dough that rises and can be baked into light-textured bread. But this is only half the story. While yeast turns sugars released from the flour by enzymes into carbon dioxide and alcohol, lactic acid bacteria are also at work. If yeast is the exuberant entrepreneur of dough expansion, lactic acid bacteria are the thrifty housekeepers. Not only do they not compete with yeast directly for food, relying on different sugars for their sustenance, but they coexist in a more active way. Lactic acid bacteria use amino acids and peptides generated by yeasts and in turn enable the yeasts to produce more carbon dioxide, as well as making gluten more elastic. These modest functional effects are disdained in the high-tech world of chemical additives and bread improvers. But lactic acid bacteria can do much more than make stretchier dough. They can transform this dough into healthy food by:

 Enhancing the nutritional properties of bread.

 Making nutrients more ‘bioavailable’.

 Counteracting certain ‘anti-nutrients’ in flour.

 Lowering its glycaemic index.

 Controlling potential spoilage organisms.

 Neutralising the parts of gluten that are harmful to people with coeliac disease and other wheat allergies.

Industrial breadmaking does not allow sufficient time for lactic acid bacteria to develop in the dough.