I did say that eating carbs wasn’t good for you. I have said it a thousand times and I always meant it. Bread at the store, even at the health food store, is mostly starch, and starch is mostly glucose. Here is an article detailing starch. In white bread about half of the weight of the slice will be starch. Starch, once in your mouth, begins to become glucose. Glucose in your intestine, goes straight to your bloodstream as a simple sugar. As your blood glucose level goes up your pancreas immediately must respond by dispatching insulin. Insulin orders all organs to take up glucose so as to keep your blood sugar in the safe operating zone. Too high and you pass out. Too low and you pass out. All of the glucose not immediately needed by nerve, muscle or organ is put into fat cells, or turned into triglycerides by the liver, so as to not kill you immediately.

This is why I have said, for the longest time, don’t eat carbohydrates.

My sourdough bread doesn’t contain very much starch. The yeast in my sourdough starter will eat the glucose in the dough. As it does it gives off carbon dioxide gas and alcohol. You can smell the alcohol in it if your nose is good. It is just like making beer, except for one thing, there is a bacteria in there too.

My vitamin factory, delivering goodness a slice at a time

When you make sourdough bread at home you are fermenting it. Fermentation allows natural yeast and bacteria to work together to convert the starch in the flour. Acetic acid–which inhibits the growth of mold, is produced in the making of sourdough. So, sourdough bread naturally preserves itself. Acetic acid the same one created when fermenting cucumbers into pickles, and cabbage into sauerkraut. The bacteria which are eating the products of the yeast are creating this acid. It is a natural preservative. My sourdough bread is fit to eat without any kind of special steps to protect it for over a week. Not only does it not mold, it stays moist and never ‘goes stale.’ (I say never because I have not had a loaf last long enough.)

The cooperation of the yeast and bacteria in sourdough create a medicine chest-worth of vitamins. Lots of people don’t realize this but the vitamins created for your pharmaceutical multivitamin are created by bacteria in fermenters. If you ferment foods yourself then a multivitamin is just not required. My sourdough creates a huge list of great-for-you things, like  vitamins B1 through B6, B12, folate, thiamin, niacin, riboflavin, and vitamin E–-in addition to uniquely balanced proteins and fatty acids.

The minerals in my 100% whole-from-wheat bread come from the soil the wheat was grown in. Good soil equals good bread, and there is no middle man in my kitchen taking the wheat germ (and minerals) off for some other purpose. The bran protecting the grains are present in my bread, too. I am getting 100% of the mineral nutrient that nature intended, as modified by my trained rot-squad of yeast and bacteria. My bread is about 50% pre-digested for me, the starches are eaten and turned into vitamins. The starches are not there to make me have a huge insulin rush when I eat.

You cannot buy this bread at a store. You can buy the wheat. You can buy the water. You can buy the salt. You cannot buy the time that it takes for the fermentation magic to occur though. It takes too long to make this for it to be commercially viable. If you add yeast to the flour and water, and if you add sugar for the yeast to eat, then you are not getting what the bacteria make. You are not getting the vitamins. You are not getting the mystery products of millennia of evolution that have not even been named yet. You are not getting BREAD. You will have saved time. You are going to be eating a facsimile of bread that contains more glucose than you need. You will be eating what I was telling you was bad for you.