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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, sliced bread is the worst.

Normal bread can get stale, dry and hard. But packaged sliced bread is much less perishable. I've seen sliced bread having the same texture and taste after a whole week of lying on a kitchen countertop. And when you read the ingredients on its packaging, you begin to understand why, as sliced bread is subject to the techniques of processed foods such as the addition of preservatives, antioxidants, stabilizers, anti-caking agents, or packaging gases, in addition to that bread being bleached, blanched, stripped of nutrients and with added sugar to make it taste better and because high-fructose corn syrup is so cheap, so why not. In addition sliced bread is subject to every health-related fad in existence. Low carb bread? Sure. Bread with Omega-3? Of course.

Basically the packaged substance in super-markets is anything but bread, then we wonder why our meals don't satisfy us and why we get fat.

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On the other hand most cities have at least some "real" bakeries where you can get a nice loaf of bread with proper crumb and flavor.

Most supermarket bread is virtually inedible to folks that have a taste for good bread. Aside from the insane ingredient list, the sickly softness of it and the lack of any decent crust and crumb makes me wonder what market forces influenced industrial bread makers. How can anyone that has tasted a traditional loaf of freshly baked bread stand for that stuff in the supermarket?

Time(convenience) and money? I love freshly baked bread, but I can't buy a loaf on a regular basis due to the strict schedule at work, and even if I do, I won't eat it all and it'll go stale very quickly.

Check out this cookbook from 2011: "Make the Bread, Buy the Butter."

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11510733-make-the-bread-b...

Baking good bread should be both easy and cheap, as long as you have an oven! That's not to say it wouldn't be better with more practice, experience, specialization, and, of course, better grains. But it might just beat "sliced bread!"

I freeze my tasty fresh bread and then double-toast it -- it'll lose some of its flavor but it's still >> wonder-bread

I buy one big loaf of "pain au levain" (French style sourdough) once a week. As much as no-knead bread has convenience, it just can't measure up in flavor and consistency to something made with a starter, kneaded, risen, and backed to perfection by a pro.

Do you have an oven - making a boule is very easy and has only 5 minutes of on hand time?

Recipe? :D

No knead bread

3 cups of flour, 2 teaspoons of salt, 1/4 teaspoon of instant yeast. Mix in a bowl. Add 1.5 cups water, mix in. A wooden spoon, especially bamboo, is nice for mixing, but you can use anything, even your hand.

Cover (lid, or plastic wrap), let sit for 12 to 20 hours. Afterwards, you should see bubbles or "craters" of bubbles on top. If after 12 hours not yet much bubbles, let sit longer. If change of plans and you have no time to bake, can store the bowl in a fridge for half a day or a day, it will develop a more sour taste.

You need a dutch oven with a lid, or a pot with a lid, or something with a lid. No plastic parts, oven proof.

Put the dutch oven into oven, heat oven to 450F/250C. When the dutch oven is very hot, take it out of the oven (careful, it really is hot), sprinkle flour or something at the bottom (I use cornmeal) to prevent sticking. Pour the dough in. Try not to degas the bubbles in the dough too much, as these are what gives the bread the oven rise. Sprinkle flour (or cornmeal, or seeds, or something) on top, not necessary but makes the bread look nicer.

Bake 30 min with lid, remove the lid, bake about 20 min, or until the bread looks almost too dark.

Here I let the dutch oven to give the shape to the bread, so this works even if the dough is too wet and cannot be shaped into a loaf. You can also experiment using a tiny bit less water to get a bit more solid dough. Most other no knead recipes still make you flour a surface and shape the loaf using your hands. This leads to more cleaning afterwards, so I just left this part out.

Wow this is great! Any thoughts if I could substitute something lower carb for the flour? Flax meal, or almond or coconut flour?

Well, first, you can use part whole grain flour. As per other substitutes, it is the special protein, gluten, in wheat that makes the dough kinda stringy, elastic, and leads to nice texture when the gas bubbles from the yeast's metabolism stay inside the dough. With other substitutes, you might start to lose this. I don't know, I have not tried. The result will still of course be edible, but it might be less aerated, more dense. If it gets too dense, maybe the result will not be pleasing anymore.

What size dutch oven? 5 quart/liter such as:

http://www.amazon.com/Lodge-L8DD3-Casserole-Skillet-5-Quart/...

As long the dough fits in, and will not rise to touch the lid in the oven. 4 to 6 quarts (litres) should be ok. Of you want a smaller bread, make a smaller dough.

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/06/better-no-knead-b...

You can search on no knead breads. They are long recipes. But require almost no hands on time. You mix, you wait, you wait, you wait, you wait, you shape, you throw into preheated dutch oven and eat :)

I took you literally on those 5 minutes. ;) That one says 15.

I was mainly hoping for the 2/3rd reduction in labor because I'm a lazy sob.

Quadruple the dough and use it on 4 consecutive days. It will average pretty close to 5 minutes then. Also cut the dough and do not tear it.

Yeah the amortized time is not much more than 5 minutes when you get it down. It comes out to a few 1-minute operations separated by resting/baking times, so if you're around anyway it's very little extra time.

Fair enough, but cooking for myself, I just don't have that kind of scale to work with. It'd go bad before I could eat it. xD

A dough could be kept in the fridge up to an week. You could also always invite a date to help :P

There's a bakery near us that makes some amazing Bavarian sunflower wheat bread. They sell it pre-sliced in a few local grocery stores as well, but it definitely doesn't keep very long. Most store-bought bread is shelf-stable for weeks, and this stuff is only a few days. We've found that freezing it and then using a toaster to thaw it works great - almost as good as fresh.

I've found great-tasting bread always goes stale within about 2 days. No way around it really. Any longer than that and it must have some preservatives, in which case taste and texture will suffer.

I won't say that all breads freeze well, but some do.

Cut up and bake for a bit coated with oil and maybe spices for amazing croutons. A little chewy in the middle is great.

> In addition sliced bread is subject to every health-related fad in existence. Low carb bread? Sure.

How could you have "low carb bread"? Bread is a big bundle of carbohydrate. It'd be like low sugar caramel.

There are some high protein breads, one example I looked has 13g carbs and 17g protein per 100g. Whereas white bread might have carbs 45g, protein 7g.

(They probably have different water contents, so just comparing per 100g is a bit problematic.)

This one is fantastic, and only 1g carbohydrate per serving because it's primarily fiber and protein: http://www.holdthecarbs.com/low-carb-fresh-baked/low-carb-wh...

(The company has some sort of patented flour substitute that they make by stripping digestible starches from wheat flour and replacing them with flax and resistant starch.)

But yeah, as bad_user points out this kind of thing raises questions about the semantics of what should be correctly considered "bread".

Fiber is still, by definition, carbohydrates. Not saying fiber is bad though.

Actually, that's an interesting challenge that the company that makes that bread (LC Foods) has run into with their nutritional labelling. Because fiber is technically carbohydrate (just not digestible by humans), there isn't really a consensus among regulatory bodies on how to treat it — specifically, Europe counts them as calorically empty while the US considers them equivalent to any other carbohydrates.

Normally, with the amount of fiber stuff actually contains, this doesn't make a practical difference, but in the case of LC Foods it means that their products' calorie counts are basically completely wrong (at least in the US; they may change them when they distribute internationally).

This is because you're thinking of actual bread and not substances that are engineered to resemble bread. Usually this is done by replacing grains in part or in whole with something else. Much like low-fat milk. Of course, a bread made of whole-wheat flour would be healthier because it contains fiber, besides some minerals that are good for us. But because we are obsessed with numbers related to specific ingredients, the food industry obliged.

> Usually this is done by replacing grains in part or in whole with something else. Much like low-fat milk.

Low fat milk is made by just removing fat from whole milk; the milk changes consistency and possibly color because of this. Fat is not a huge component of milk.

There are milk products that replace the fat with some fat-like substitute; for example, a store near me sells something called "fat-free half and half", when half and half should be about 10% fat. But low-fat milk just refers to milk with a large part of the fat removed.

You don't just remove fat from milk. For one because it loses taste and texture, they have to compensate by adding things like powder milk, sucrose or high-fructose corn syrup and colorants amongst others. Of course the list of ingredients vary, depending on the country and on what's being banned or not.

But the more interesting fact is that when stripping the fat from milk you can't just strip out 1.5% or 2%. Oh no, that's inefficient, the milk produced by cows is not that uniform and the tools we have aren't that precise.

So to obtain milk with 1.5% of fat (you know, the middle one, that's usually colored with blue, sitting between the green that's 0.5% and the red that's 3.5%) ... well, for 1.5% fat they have to strip whatever they can, then re-add that fat until they get the desired percentage. And what they add back is not the same fat that they stripped. No, what they add back is vegetable fat, usually from soy and animal fat of all sorts. Like for example there could be pork fat in the cow milk that you're drinking.

Disclaimer: my father is a veterinarian that has been the director of the center for food safety in my city and I live in Europe. Boy, he can tell me stories.

With all due respect, you have no idea what you're talking about.

http://stage.rosiediscovers.com/wp-content/uploads/blogger/-...

http://ij.org/press-release/florida-skim-milk-release-11-20-...

The milk in my fridge right now (not Lucerne -- Clover) claims the following ingredients: milk (or "low-fat milk"), nonfat milk, vitamin A palmitate, and vitamin D3. The whipping cream, which would be a place to add nonmilk fats if there was any such place, claims cream, nonfat milk solids, carrageenan, polysorbate 80, and mono- and diglycerides. There's corn syrup in the eggnog, but that's supposed to be sweet.

So, to sum up:

Skim milk is made by taking raw milk and removing the fat. It loses taste and texture this way, which is why I hate skim milk. It also loses appearance, becoming a sort of sickly nearly-translucent blueish-white color.

Low-fat milk is made by mixing whole milk and skim milk in the appropriate proportions.

Sugar is not a milk additive, nor is nonmilk fat. There is definitely not pork fat in the milk we're drinking.

There is natural variation in the amount of fat present in milk. This is allowed, particularly for "whole milk".

Powder milk really is used to make eggnog and whipping cream. However, it's hard to argue that adding powder milk adulterates milk.

Vitamin A and/or D3 are almost always added to US milk. That's not for any cosmetic purpose; it is a public health measure.

In the US, it would be illegal to sell milk with added vegetable oils without including the vegetable oil on the label.

I can buy that someone does it somewhere, I don't for a second buy that the entire dairy industry is in on it.

It's also the case that the fat in store milk has been mixed into the milk, it naturally tends to separate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homogenization_%28chemistry%29

It's not all bad. Dave's Killer Bread is decent when it comes to ingredients. Even so, I've moved almost exclusively to baking my own.

I don't know. My entire life's experience with grocery bought sliced bread is that it gets mouldy very quickly.

I think it probably differs a lot around the world. Some places are far less prone to use preservatives than others.

Maybe humidity too.

There's an excellent 99% Invisible podcast about this: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/good-bread/

But on the flip side it must be very good for the shareholders.

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