Improve the digestibility of bread | SOURDOUGH
I love bread. I don’t want to love bread so much, but I do. I was raised on freshly baked bread, and have worked as a baker more than once. I can appreciate that bread, though nutritious to some degree, is a filler food and nutritionally pales in comparison to a protein-topped salad. But I still want to have it at least sometimes. But how to make it as nutritious and digestively tolerant as possible?
The answer is fermentation. Fermenting grains makes the nutrients more digestible and absorbable. The content of nutrients doesn’t matter, it’s the bioavailability of those nutrients. Whole grain breads are known to be more nutrient dense, but without the fermentation process these nutrients are not available for absorption.
If you want to have a bread that has a high quantity of bioavailable minerals, free amino acids and proteins, you need to decrease the level of pH which activates phytase (an enzyme) which in turn deactivates phytic acid (an anti-nutrient) which frees up these nutrients. In sourdough, the strains of microbes (a mutually beneficial interplay between yeast and bacteria) reduce the pH quickly allowing for this enzyme activation without risking spoilage.
Adding legumes (chickpeas, beans, lentils) increases nutrients as well, but again, requires fermentation to exploit the nutritional profile of the therein.
Benefits of sourdough
By what seems like magic, sourdough actually has an intermediate or low glycemic index, due to the biologic acidification during the fermentation process.
During sour dough fermentation there is a decrease in the gluten content as well.
Sourdough is more digestible than bakers yeast bread.
- Less gas during digestion
- Less change in transit time in GI tract (constipation or diarrhea)
- More absorption of nutrients like free amino acids
And often these is less salt because the fermentation more flavour.
Bioavailability of phenols (antioxidants) naturally present in flours and legumes is increased with fermentation.
Lactic acid bacteria in the sour dough bread have the ability to synthesize even more powerful antioxidants and their availability.
Low-FODMAP bread??
FODMAPS, or fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols, are compounds found in foods that tend to be more difficult to digest for some people because gut bacteria will digest/ferment them and this will lead to gas and digestive upset.
But what if we completed this digestion/fermentation outside of the body first? What if we have the perfect cocktail of bacteria and yeast in our sour dough culture so that the majority of the fuel for this gas-forming process was already completed before the was put in our mouths? I believe this is possible. At least I hope it is.
Cereals contain fructans, not in high content, but if we eat a lot of cereals we are exposed to a lot of it. Instead of eliminating cereals, you can have a specific sour dough starter that has the specific lactic acid bacteria capability of deactivating fructans to non-irritating compounds. And I can imagine a world where we can have a gut microbiome assessment that allows us to determine what strains are needed to compensate for our digestive deficiencies, so that we can consume bread, in its most ancestral form, regularly and easily! And more, not only will this bread be tolerable for us, but actually beneficial as it may act as a prebiotic for our resident bacterial population.
