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| That mother-of-the-year award doesn't win itself! |
But in some ways, I am glad that the English muffin was moldy. To me, it indicates that the bread was not so pumped with various chemicals or stripped of its nutrients that it became immune to the natural decay of fresh foods. And, I should note, this is not the first time this has happened with these English muffins (...really, you think I would have looked before giving the muffin to my girl!).
With so many choices in the bread and bakery aisles, what makes a good bread? How do you know what to shop for?
Bread Basics
At its most basic, bread is simply composed of flour, water, yeast and salt, with sometimes the addition of sugar and oil. But enter any store and the basics go out the window. In her What to Eat, Marion Nestle quotes the master baker at BreadLine:
"The difference between good bread and bad bread is the most expensive ingredient--time. What the big bakeries do is to replace time with stabilizers, dough softeners, preservatives, and other chemicals so the bread develops quickly and evenly and stays on a supermarket shelf looking and feeling fresh--even when it isn't." (page 484)
Big bakeries add water and air to dough to get more bread made for every pound of flour. They add dough conditioners and additives like sodium stearoyl lactylate, monoglycerides, diglycerides, ascorbic acid, azodicarbonamide, and diacetyl tartaric ester of monoglyceride (Pandora's Lunchbox, page 102). In an attempt to "clean up" labels, some bakeries turn to enzymes like lipase, glucose oxidase, and xylanase to replace conditioners (Pandora's Lunchbox, page 122). However, since these enzymes are inactivated in the baking process, they are not always listed. Some of these enzymes are the product of genetic engineering, so a way to avoid some of them is to go organic (not 'all natural', which has no legal definition).
Bread for the Family
In an ideal world, everyone would make bread at home, controlling all of the ingredients. However, even with a bread machine, this is hardly practical for most families (and even when I do make bread, I can never slice it thinly enough for sandwiches!).
Specialty bakeries do offer breads with short ingredient lists. For example, Spring Mill Bread Company even grinds their own wheat for their breads. Again, however, a special trip to the bread store may not be an option. Sometimes, I just need a loaf to make sandwiches for everyone's lunchboxes.
What are your bread-in-a-bag options? Time to check out the bread shelves at Giant and Whole Foods for good options. But first a little more about the ingredients:
Flour--The best is whole wheat flour (whole grain flour). This flour contains the bran and germ of the wheat, retaining most of the fiber and key nutrients (see previous post for overview). Regular wheat flour has been refined and is missing most of the fiber and nutrients. Enriched wheat flour means that some of the nutrients have been added back (niacin, riboflavin, thiamin, folic acid, and iron).
An element of time comes into play with flour. Wheat flour starts out brown, but, over time, naturally turns white. Bleaching and bromate treatment whitens the flour more quickly. These chemicals disappear or become inactive with baking and storage, but may leave a chemical taste. So white flour that is labeled as unbleached and unbromated is just aged longer.
Bread flour has a higher gluten content than the regular all-purpose flour. Gluten are proteins that form networks in dough that traps gas released by yeast, creating the puffy-ness of bread.
Fiber--Some breads are high in fiber due to whole grain/whole wheat flour, but others have purified cellulose added to up the fiber content.
Organic or not?--Remember, organic is not necessarily healthier. Yes, you avoid genetically modified ingredients, but sugar is still sugar, whether honey or HFCS.
Shopping for Bread
Somehow it seems appropriate that I am writing this post during the week of Halloween, but not because the moldy English muffin was scary. It is the bread options that are truly frightening!
In my grocery store search, I concentrated on wheat and whole wheat breads, checking out a few multigrain breads along the way.
Rule 1--Read the ingredient label. Ingredients are listed in order of most to least, so this gives you an idea of how much of any ingredient is in the bread. A good measurement to keep in mind is that most loaves have about 1 teaspoon of salt per loaf, so any ingredient listed before salt is likely greater than one teaspoon.
Rule 2--Read the Nutrition Facts panel. Keep in mind that gram amounts may be rounded up or down. A bread with 1 gram of fiber listed may actually have less than a gram. In my search, I focused on fiber, sugar, and protein, with an occasional eye to sodium.
Whole Foods Shopping
Let's start with the English muffins of mold fame:
Whole Foods brand 100% Whole Wheat English Muffins
15 ingredients. Not fabulous, but the first 4 ingredients are water, whole wheat flour, wheat gluten, cultured wheat flour. One muffin has 3 grams of fiber, 7 grams of protein, and only one gram of sugar.
Moving on to the whole wheat bread I usually buy:
Vermont Bread Company Soft Whole Wheat Bread
14 ingredients. First four ingredients: whole wheat flour, water, wheat gluten, canola oil. 2 grams of fiber, 4 grams protein, less than one gram sugar.
Not bad, but it seems I could do better. I checked another Vermont Bread product, Organic Whole Wheat bread. Still 14 ingredients with organic whole wheat flour as the first. Fiber and sugar were the same as the non-organic option, just a little less protein (2 grams). Mainly, this bread just gets me organic ingredients.
Sadly, those breads seemed to be the best choices. With a brand name like Ultimate Grains, I was sure their 100% Whole Wheat or Ancient 12 Grain breads would be winners. First three ingredients for each: whole wheat flour, water, sugar. Each slice has 4 grams of sugar! The equivalent of one teaspoon!
The theme of added sugar continued. Whole Foods Organic 100% Whole Wheat, 365 Organic Touch of Honey Whole Wheat, and Whole Foods Wheat Sandwich breads all had sugar as their third ingredient. For all of these, I didn't even count the number of ingredients. With this much sugar, back on the shelf these loaves went.
The only way to get a shorter ingredient list was to move to the fresh breads at the Whole Foods bakery counter. Their organic rustic wheat bread has only 7 ingredients. Wheat flour is first ingredient with whole wheat flour third, so the fiber content is probably not too high (there is no nutrition facts label for this fresh bread). But I considered it a victory that there was no added sugar!
Giant Shopping
Right before I walked out, I did check a few white breads. My thought was that, perhaps, it would be better to eat white bread without the sugar than whole wheat with. However, disappointment followed me. The white breads were also high in sugar content.
A Needle in a Haystack--The Best Bread for Your Family
The experience at Whole Foods and at Giant made me angry. I thought of how many customers (moms!) who are buying various whole wheat breads, thinking they are making a healthy choice for their families. And while the fiber and other whole wheat-provided nutrients are important, children and adults don't need all of the added sugar. Honestly, when I started my grocery tour, I had no idea that added sugar would be such an important issue.
My best advice is to find a time when you have few extra minutes at the grocery store. Take the time to read the ingredient lists and the Nutrition Facts on multiple breads. Find one that works for your family. This little bit of extra time at the store will pay off in the end. You can keep buying the same bread, knowing it is a good fit for you and your family, flying down the bread aisle as you grab-and-go.
Baking Bread At Home
Knowing that I would be writing a post on bread, I thought I should actually make some. For some reason, yeast breads intimidate me. Something about the time, rising, and kneading. So I decided to get out my husband's bread machine. He occasionally makes bread with it, but uses boxed mixes. Frankly, I have never been impressed with his results.
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| Homemade Whole Wheat Bread |
Since breaking out the machine, I have made white bread, French bread (also white), and whole wheat bread from scratch. All yummy! While the whole wheat bread was good, I think my family liked the white and French breads better. Happily, the white breads just have a small amount of sugar (I need to fiddle with the whole wheat recipe--4 Tablespoons of sugar per loaf is a lot!).
And I think making white bread at home is fine, since we eat whole wheat breads the rest of the time. After all, something about warm bread with dinner is divine. And it makes me think of this quote of Marion Nestle's:
"Bread is the one place where my nutritional correctness weakens. No question, 100 percent whole wheat bread is the better nutritional choice, always and often...But I cannot think of anything that tastes as good as a painstakingly made, freshly baked white bread..." (What to Eat, page 494)
References
All quotes and sources are linked in the above text. General nutrition information came from Whitney and Rolfes' Understanding Nutrition, 13th ed. and from Nutrition for Sport and Exercise, 2nd ed. by Dunford and Doyle.
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