Comment by dcchambers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dcchambers | Hacker News Reader

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It's standard for western countries to add iron and other nutrients to white flour. It's referred to as "enriched flour" in ingredient lists and it's in basically all processed foods that contain wheat.

That said, whole grain wheat is naturally high in iron, magnesium, folic acid, and other nutrients. If we would just use the whole grain (the bran, the germ, and the endosperm) rather than just the starchy endosperm, we would gain all of those nutrients without the need to enrich them.

I bake a lot of sourdough bread, always with some percent of 100% extraction (non-sifted) stone-ground whole wheat flour. We all should be eating far more whole grains.

Note: "whole wheat" products you see in the grocery store are often not produced by traditional 100% extraction whole grains. They often use roller mills to mill just the endosperm, and then add back in a certain portion of finely ground bran to give it color + flavor...but it's certainly not true whole grain.

The never-ending word games with food packaging/marketing is frustrating (infuriating?). Sometimes it's manufacturers complying with the letter of packaging regulations while (IMHO in bad faith) violating them in spirit, some is with the food industry corrupting the regulations themselves.

> stone-ground whole wheat flour

This is just one in a sea of examples. A small % of consumers get wise to the fact that hyperprocessed flour that's industrially ground into a fine powder isn't as healthy as stone ground. Food industry responds by labeling bread "stone ground" that has none of the properties that make that make stone-ground bread superior:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoneground_flour

> In the USA flour only has to 'pass between stones' once during its manufacture to be regarded as stoneground, and it has been claimed that a significant proportion of flour sold as stoneground in the USA has not been processed in this way, being ordinary roller-ground wholemeal.

So not only is the food industry going to produce a bunch of poisonous/unhealthy crap for the sake of profits that's making our entire country sick, the small % of people who do some research and go out of their way to find needle-in-a-haystack healthier selections are going to be duped as well.

The solution I have found is to buy from smaller, local, often family-run mills that literally only have a traditional stone mill and don't even have roller mills. Buy from companies/people you trust.

This doesn't really scale though, at least not at the costs people expect to pay for flour, and I don't have a solution for that. I'm often paying $2-3/lb when purchased in bulk from my co-op, but in the end I consider it cheap for what I am getting and bread baking is a cheap hobby overall. Meanwhile, you can get white flour from a big national brand in grocery stores for far less than a dollar a pound.

Do you find bread baking to have a low enough time cost that it doesn’t feel onerous to do week-to-week?

I'm lucky enough to be able to work remotely most of the week, so that's given me a ton of flexibility. Bread baking, especially sourdough, takes a lot of passive time, not active time. It's very easy to prep and bake a loaf while working from home since 95% of the time you're just waiting for it to rise.

Before that, I usually baked on the weekends. There is a time (and kitchen space!) investment required for bread, but I enjoy it because it's one of the few ways I get to work with my hands and create something. Otherwise I spend all day working on the computer. Creating physically, even baked goods, is a form of meditation to me. So for that reason I do find it a worthwhile use of my time.

Like another poster has said, even when making bread in the traditional way, only a small part of the time is active and most of the time you can do in parallel other activities.

This year I have transitioned to a simplified way of making bread, by baking it into a microwave oven. This is fast enough to allow me to make at home a bread every morning when I wake up, for breakfast.

The active part, i.e. adding the ingredients, kneading the dough, transferring to the oven and washing the vessels at the end takes only around a quarter of an hour. The baking time is perfectly reproducible. It depends on the oven and on the quantity of dough. In my oven I bake a bread made of 500 g of wheat floor for 13 minutes @ 1000 W, in a glass vessel covered by a lid.

It is possible to use a leavening agent for a softer bread, but when baked in a microwave oven even the unleavened bread grows enough for my taste (especially if, instead of being put in the baking vessel as a flat disc, the dough is first rolled into a cylinder and then bent into a torus that fills the baking vessel).

The home-made bread, if it is pure, should be eaten immediately after cooling, because unlike the commercial bread with additives, it has a poor shelf life.

Obviously, the bread baked in a microwave oven lacks the crust, but this is healthier and I prefer it that way. Many microwave ovens include a heating lamp that could be used to make a crust, but I have not attempted to make such a bread.

Depends a bit on your recipe and your life.

It does take quite a bit of "wall time" to produce a loaf of bread, but very little of that is "active" work: 15-20 minutes mixing/kneading, 10 minutes shaping, plus baking. The rest is inactive time while you're waiting for the dough to rise.

If your schedule lines up, then it's not bad at all. For a while, I made a sourdough that perfectly lined up with my weekend routine. I'd mix it on Saturday night and put it in the cool part of the fridge. On Sunday morning, I pulled it out before leaving to play in a pick-up league in the park. A few hours later, I'd be tired and the dough would be risen. I'd shower, shape it, and run some errands during the second rise. When I got home, I'd pop it in the oven while I put away the groceries.

Timewise, this was perfect. The bigger downside was that my (small) kitchen was always a bit of a mess: flour gets everywhere and cleaning the bowls gunks up your sponge. Still, the bread was delicious!

If you have a stand-mixer with a dough hook, making bread is quite low effort. Even if you hand-knead, it's not terrible. It takes a long time for the bread to rise and bake, but you can do other stuff while that is going on.

If all you want is a loaf of bread the timing goes like this:

- Before going to bed mix to a rough dough 500 g flour, 400 g water, 8 g salt (50% KCl works fine), 2 g dried yeast. Takes les than five minutes.

- Leave it in a bowl covered overnight, takes the worker no time at all

- In the morning heat put a cast iron pot and lid in the oven and heat to 250°C, takes the worker one minute

- while the oven is heating take the dough and shape it into a reasonably smooth ball, takes about two minutes.

- Drop the ball into the pot, put on the lid, put it back in the oven. One minute

- After half an hour take off the lid. One minute

- After another fifteen minutes the bread is ready. Take it out of the oven and leave on a rack to cool for half an hour. One minute of work

About 11 minutes, certainly less than fifteen minutes of actual work.

If you get some kind of machine to knead the dough you can do it with an elapsed time of about three hours and about the same amount of work. If you devote another ten minutes you can make a batch of twenty good sized bread rolls.

I make bread rolls three or four times a week for a family of four. It's not a large fraction of my day and on Sunday when I am cooking dinner anyway it hardly adds any time at all.

I believe that whole wheat spoils much faster due to the addition of proteins, moisture and other things and is much less shelf stable than white flour.

Isn't it still measured in months (after purchase)?

Addition? The whole point about whole wheat is that you neither take away nor add anything.

> It's standard for western countries to add iron and other nutrients to white flour.

Not sure I would generalize that to western countries. In Germany for example the opposite is true; it's actually illegal to enrich staple foods like flour or milk etc.

What’s the rationale there?

maybe to keep nutrient content of natural products high?

If you start to fortify everthing, food producers will just put the cheapest stuff inside. Moreover they will not care if their processing method destroys micronutrients.

I think this type of intervention recognises that an element of pragmatism can have a significant impact on population scale healthcare for a very modest cost and with low risk. People who get to worry about how long their wheat has spent touching stone aren't generally the ones who the intervention is targeting. They're different issues at different scales.

For another example, see the impressive work of Iodine Global Network - https://ign.org

Is there some corresponding law that prevents the cheap, no-nutrition food from being sold anyway?

Probably the same idea as the one that is often claimed to be behind the Reinheitsgebot from 16th century Germany (Bavaria?) that regulated the making of beer, that is, to ensure purity.

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