Lexie Carroll’s Reviews > Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation > Status Update

By now the public is aware of & wanting the benefits of whole grain, but modern mill machinery has been expressly designed to get the whitest possible flour, splitting off germ at first break. Milling white flour & selling off the nutrients is more profitable than selling it whole. To leave the germ in the flour would literally ‘gum up the works’. The engineering & nutrition are pulling in opposite directions.

White flour was easier to bake with & more portable, consolidating & industrializing the milling industry. However nutrient deficiencies fostered by widespread white flour/bread consumption became a problem, so industry & gov’t decided to fortify white bread. Here was a classic capitalist “solution”: rather than address a problem at its source, the milling industry could now sell the problem AND the solution.

Another reason modern milling pushed towards white flour: bran (its impact on dough)- taste & aeration.
Bran tends to be bitter, so whiter flour meant sweeter bread.
Milling the whole grain cuts the bran into microscopic shards, which are like tiny knives that pierce the gluten strands & impair its ability to hold air & rise.
Those tiny bran knives are relatively heavy too, making it more difficult to raise a loaf.

Stand back far enough, and the absurdity of this makes you wonder about the sanity of our species: when wheat is milled the most nutritious part of the seed is scrupulously sheared off (coat of bran, the embryo/germ). The best 25% of the seed (vitamins & antioxidants, minerals & healthy oils) are often sold to the pharmaceutical industry, which recovers some of the vitamins & sells them back to us as fortification.

The microbes needed for bread fermentation are probably everywhere, but their growth is dependent on the baker controlling the environment: food & feeding schedule, ambient temperature, amount of water.
Frequent feedings & warm temperatures favor the yeasts, creating an airy milder loaf; less feedings & refrigeration favors the bacteria, leading to a more acidic environment, and more strongly flavored bread.

Bread fermentation depends on a symbiotic relationship between a yeast (Candida milleri) and a bacteria (Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis). Each microbe consumes a different type of sugar, so they don’t compete for food. When the yeasts die their proteins break down into amino acids needed by the bacteria. L.s also produces acids that C.m. is fine with but that discourage other yeasts & bacteria.

On microwaving food:
“Is there any more futile, soul irradiating experience than standing before the little window on a microwave oven watching the carousel slowly revolve your frozen block of dinner? Time spent this way might be easier than cooking, but it is not enjoyable and surely not ennobling. It is to feel spiritually unemployed, useless to self and humanity.”

“Once I committed a couple of hours to being in the kitchen, I found my usual impatience fade & could give myself over to the afternoon’s unhurried project…There’s something about such work that seems to alter the experience of time, helps me to reoccupy the present tense. ‘When chopping onions, JUST chop onions.’ One of the great luxuries of life at this point is to be able to do ONE thing at a time.”

Time (slow cooking) is an essential ingredient in braises. When you first cook meat (a muscle), it tenses up (tight/tough), but after more time it “relaxes”.
Start a braise in the oven at 200 with the lid off, for 2 hours. This brings the liquid to ~ 120 which allows enzymes to break down connective tissues. Then cover the pot and increase temp to 250, until the meat reaches 180 (3-4 hrs): collagen melts=tender!

Umami Foods:
Tomatoes
Dried mushrooms
Parmesan
Cured anchovies
Meat stocks
Bacon
Soy sauce & miso
Dashi broth (kombu kelp + dried bonito fish)
* breast milk! (amino acids are cellular fuel & molecular building blocks of special value to growing stomach & intestinal tissues)