Gluten
Ever since I discovered the world's
fluffiest 100% whole wheat bread, white flour has seen little use
in our house. Every week or two, I'd put in an hour or so of
effort and then serve up bread which was nutritious and
delicious. Until the inevitable day of reckoning came --- the day
we ran out of gluten.
Gluten was discovered by 7th century Buddhist monks, who mixed flour
with water and kneaded until they extracted the protein (gluten) from
the starch. Their goal was to use the gluten as a meat
substitute, but other folks discovered that if you add the gluten back
into some other flour when making bread, you increase the protein
content of the bread and also increase the fluff by an order of
magnitude.
Of course, you can't just
pour gluten into your bread dough and expect to get the world's
fluffiest bread. You have to knead the dough
obsessively as well. As you knead the bread, the gluten forms
long strands which later trap the carbon dioxide emitted by the yeast,
holding in the fluff rather than letting it dissipate away. The
result is a whole wheat bread that even those raised on wonder bread
will enjoy. For best results, use about a quarter of a cup of
gluten per loaf of bread (half a cup for a two loaf recipe.)
One last note on gluten --- don't bother trying to buy it in the baking
aisle in a mainstream grocery store. At the prices charged there,
you might as well just buy the fancy artisanal bread a few aisle
over. Instead, search for gluten in bulk. We got ours at a
Mennonite store, but I've been told that Whole Foods may carry it at a
decent price. Once you find it, don't forget to honor those
Buddhist monks who helped us discover that healthy bread can also be
delicious --- maybe life isn't suffering after all.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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