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What are the Benefits of Baking Homemade Bread?

Nowadays, we all seem to be pressed for time and money. There just doesn’t seem to be enough of both. This all leads to stress. This blog is also about knees and how to have healthy knees. So first let’s take the issue of stress, which just about everyone is feeling, head on.

One indirect factor of knee pain is stress. And fact is, stress is a major component of modern life. Decades ago, Freud the famous psychologist wrote the book, Civilization and its Discontents. What to do? We need to get back in touch with the everyday stuff humans used to do for themselves. One thing I do is bake my own bread.

8 Spiritual Benefits of Baking Your Own Bread at Home

  • It gives you a mental break from all the stress, cares and preoccupations of daily life.
  • You know exactly what ingredients went into it, maximizing benefits and minimizing artificial and other ingredients, such as excess sugar, that cause inflammation and undermine health. This gives you peace of mind.
  • Those around you appreciate home made bread.
  • Home made bread is fresh and delicious out of the oven.
  • You can teach others, such as your children, your spouse, or neighbors and acquaintances.
  • Baking bread is a community event that is free of controversy and builds friendships and solidarity.
  • As the old saying goes, ‘nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven.
  • To paraphrase the three great demands of the people–Peace, Love, and Bread.

 

 

5 Additional Benefits of Homebaked Bread

  • You avoid the store bought packaged bread, which often has weird additives that we shouldn’t eat in the first place. Bad for health.
  • We have more control over the ingredients–you can put almost anything we want into a loaf of bread!! Different flours, even things like olives, walnuts, seeds cheese, etc.
  • If you have food allergies, for example, to gluten, you can make bread without wheat and its gluten
  • Fresh bread is, well, fresh, whereas store bought is usually several days old by the time you get it
  • Homemade bread is cheaper. You don’t pay for packaging, advertising, transport and middlemen

 

 

Here is the Bread Recipe I Made Up

 

Homemade sesame whole wheat bread I just baked this bread. It’s made with mostly regular bread flour. If I use all whole wheat flour it is more nutritious, but doesn’t look as nice.

My white bread loving friends say that a heavy whole wheat, whole grain bread tastes like eating a brick. And my all natural foodie friends think white bread tastes like eating a feather pillow. So each to his or her own.

Whatever you do, if it’s fresh with real ingredients, you can’t go too far wrong. The only ‘danger’ is that it tastes so good, right out of the oven, you may eat the whole thing before it cools down, adding to your weight. So a little restraint, OK:)?

 

1 1/2 cups White Bread Flour
1/4 cup Whole wheat Flour
1/4 cup Rye Flour
1/4 cup poppy seeds
2 duck eggs
1/4 cup olive oil
Honey, yeast, water, oil for total liquids 1 cup.

Take a look at the ingredients. While whole wheat, white unbleached and rye flours are quite common in bread. But where do you think you’ll find bread made with duck eggs (which are more nutritious than chicken eggs), poppy seeds, which also add nutrition and flavor, and olive oil. Most breads, especially store bought, have cheaper ingredients. Which are also not as healthy.

I hand made this. No bread machine. Let it rise once, made this loaf, baked 35 minutes for nice brown crust. A great midnight snack.

 

Secret to a Quick Bread Rise

Before you get your other ingredients together, heat a small amount of water, hot enough to dip your finger in. Add it to a mix of activated dry yeast and either real natural brown sugar, or a couple of table spoons of honey. Get your dry ingredients together while the yeast mixture is doing its thing.

By the time you put your dries into a nice big mixing bowl. and get your wets, such as eggs, milk, honey, oil, butter, and so on, the yeast mixture should have frothed up to make a nice thick head of foam. Add that to the other ingredients in a measuring cup. It should come to about a cup of liquid.

The oil keeps the bread dough from being too sticky, so it is easier to cleanup.

Yes, all my Vegan, Keto, low carb, zero gluten and all the other diet fad friends. It breaks all their rules. But sometimes, there’s nothing like a nice piece of bread, a sandwich, or some of the other great stuff you can do with bread, like stuffing or french toast or even the lowly PB and J sandwich.

 

Learn to Bake Bread the Zen Way

I learned this when I lived in a Zen community in the USA. One of the first books on natural foods baking was by Zen monk Ed Brown, who wrote The Tassajara Bread Book, named after Tassajara, site of the first Zen monastery in the USA, where I lived for 2 years.

The Tassajara Bread Book
  • Amazon Kindle Edition
  • Brown, Edward Espe (Author)
  • English (Publication Language)
  • 196 Pages - 02/15/2011 (Publication Date) - Shambhala (Publisher)

Last update on 2024-11-05 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API

 

Post Note: Scared to Bake from Scratch? Try This

After writing this post, I realized that, while baking is second nature to me, having baked for almost 40 years, that it might be a bit intimidating to try baking at home with no one right at your side. So what to do? Get a bread baking machine! You just add the ingredients, press the button, and these machines do all the rest.

I just did a quick search on Amazon, and as ‘a bread expert’ (hope I’m not being presumptuous here:) I picked out three which look real good. Check them out!

Last update on 2024-11-05 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API