Healthy bread can be both nourishing and delicious. But what about those of us that seem to struggle with stomach upset and achy joints when we eat our bread? Is there something that might help us make our bread even healthier? Hint: we’re going to talk about natural leavening.
Please Note: This is not a short, succinct post. I’m sharing the journey that I engaged in as I tried to find a healthy bread I could consume without becoming ill. I share it in the hope that it might be helpful for those who have likewise struggled. If you’re not interested in the story, here’s a quick link for one of our favorite healthy breads:
—>>>Sourdough Maple Bread<<<—
What is Healthy Bread?
I think a better question to ask is, “What is healthy bread for you?”
The answer may actually turn out to be no bread, even if it’s just for a time. I went off grains entirely for nearly a year. After that, I had to change how I prepared my grains to make them a little healthier so I could actually eat them. (See that whole explanation below).
When I say “healthy” here’s what I mean:
- whole grain flours
- real fats like butter and coconut oil
- nourishing sweeteners like molasses and honey
- sea salt
They may also include fruits, vegetables, herbs, cultured dairy and sourdough (natural leaven) culture. For example:
- Here’s a quality no-knead bread recipe from Northern Homestead.
- Common Sense Homesteading has a post with 13 healthy bread recipes.
Cookbooks with Healthy Bread Recipes
Whole Foods for the Whole Family
No-Knead Bread
Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day
The one thing to remember as you’re working your dough when it’s this wet is that your hands need to be wet, in order for it not to stick. Anyway, great concept, great book with a lot of recipes.
Soaked Dough Bread
If you don’t want to mess with a whole book to know if you like the method, you can try this one from Elliot Homestead – Traditional Soaked Whole Wheat Bread. NOTE – this IS a yeast bread but its a very, very yummy yeast bread.
You can also find this recipe in Shaye Elliot’s cookbook, The Elliot Homestead: From Scratch
At War With Grains
I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with bread this past year – grains in general, in fact. At one point, my digestion was so broken that I couldn’t really eat anything, grain based or not, that didn’t make me sick.
It all started when I noticed an allergic reaction every time I ground my wheat. The reactions progressively got worse, until I just couldn’t grind it anymore if I wanted to breathe. Since I’m fond of breathing, someone else was elected wheat grinder.
Then I realized that I was getting sick every time I ate bread. Then oats, amaranth and quinoa.
I started investigating Celiac disease and didn’t feel I had enough of the symptoms to say that was the problem. I started researching dietary cleanses and tried a few. They helped enormously but I still couldn’t eat grain without getting sick. I even tried eating grains raw to no avail, although sprouted was easier on my system.
I learned more and more about the rampant yeast problem in America and how yeast overgrowth can be traced to a myriad of ills and evils in our health. I did an herbal yeast cleanse and knew I was on the right track but there was still something missing.
Health in the Navel
I was eventually lead to a class given by Jonell Francis . Her topic? Yeast overgrowth and damaged guts, or digestive systems. She shared her story of illness and years of conventional medicine failing to give her the results she craved – health and vitality! Jonell started researching alternative ideas and also searched her scriptures for an answer.
She started to take notice of how often the Lord promised the blessings of health in the navel and then marrow in the bones to those who would seek them. Jonell realized that she would never have the strength she needed until she healed her navel first – but how?
Through her class I learned the various steps required to heal a damaged gut and start my journey back to strength. For more information on that process and Jonell’s work, please visit her site by accessing the link on her name.
She also has a cookbook, which I use and love, called The Feel Good Cookbook.
To use food to restore your gut health, please also consider The Heal Your Gut Cookbook, by Hilary Boyton. I’ve used this book with my family and highly recommend it.
Natural Leavening or Sourdough Was the Answer
No, I haven’t forgotten this is a post about bread, I promise!
So, after I started working on healing my gut, I strongly felt like it was time to start incorporating grain back into my diet. I again tried soaking various grains before consuming them. But gluten or gluten free grains, it didn’t seem to matter what I did, they still left me feeling weak.
Through prayer (yes, I was praying to figure out how to eat grain!), I was introduced to a healthier way to prepare bread grains by Dr. Matthew and Amy Mclean when they taught a local class on natural leavening, or sourdough.
This was it! Yippee! I went home and practiced what I’d learned and have since discovered that I’m able to eat wheat, especially ancient grains like Khorizan. I just need to prepare it properly!
Einkorn.com explains the health benefits of various traditional grain preparations, including natural leavening – click here.
I still limit my intake of sourdough bread; I can’t eat much, but I can eat some.
Also Try Soaking
After a time, I was able to introduce pre-soaked grains back into my diet as well – oats, amaranth, etc.
For example, when I make oatmeal for my family:
- I roll the groats at night and soak them in filtered water with either some raw milk or a dash of fresh lemon.
- In the morning, I rinse the oats until the water runs clear.
- Then, I heat them to finish cooking them and serve the oats with butter.
Natural Leavening Cookbooks
Watch Out for Commercial Yeast
If you decide you’d like to try naturally leavened, or sourdough bread, there are cookbooks that can help. The one thing you really need to watch out for when considering one of these books is to make sure they don’t include commercial yeast in their recipes, because most of them do.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with commercial yeast except that it’s sold it its isolated form. It’s missing all the natural checks and balances that God put along yeasts to help our systems digest both it and the grains we eat with it. Nourishing Traditions shares this quote from Claude Aubert about commercial yeast:
“The history of bread making is a good example of the industrialization and standardization of a technique that was formerly empiric….It was simpler to replace natural leaven with brewer’s yeast. There are numerous practical advantages: the fermentation is more regular, more rapid, and the bread rises better. But the fermentation becomes mainly an alcoholic fermentation and the acidification is greatly lessened. The bread is less digestible, less tasty and spoils more easily (emphasis added).”
At any rate, if you’re trying to avoid commercial yeast and ONLY use sourdough in your bread recipes, be sure to read recipes all the way through before you try them.
I’ve become really picky about books that claim to tell us how to use natural leaven because so many of them have that commercial yeast in their recipes. That’s totally cheating and missing the point! Quite frankly, a lot of the reason behind using sourdough is so that I don’t have to use that yeast anymore. My body just doesn’t like it.
To help you find some good resources, I have some sourdough cookbooks recommended below.
Decent Natural Leaven Baking Book
Classic Sourdoughs
I have five small children that I homeschool, a homestead to run, a family to care for and this blog as a part time job. I needed a simple method that was something I could work into my schedule without an act of Divine Intervention.
Fantastic Sourdough Baking Books
Melissa Richardson and Caleb Wornock wrote a book called The Art of Baking with Natural Yeasts
Melissa then wrote a second book called Beyond Basics with Natural Yeast
I own both of these books and love them. In my opinion, they’re the best books out there for this topic and I highly recommend them. Melissa makes anyone, even novice bakers, comfortable with baking healthy breads with natural leaven.
Some Natural Leavening Websites
Healthy bread and Natural Leavening
Sweet Sourdough Dragon Bread
The perfect bread for Michaelmas, dragon-themed birthday parties, or a family reading of any dragon story.
Sourdough Tortillas
The Ultimate Guide to Baking Sourdough Bread [Homemade Recipes]
Sourdough Chocolate Cake with Honey Buttercream Icing (einkorn friendly)
Free Sample
For more information on natural leaven, or sourdough, please visit that section in our book The Do It Yourself Homestead. For a free sample of that book, just email me and I’ll get you set up! With 400 pages of homesteading information on many topics, you’re bound to find something useful to you! Here’s what author and whole food Chris Dalziel has to say about The Do It Yourself Homestead:
Cover photo gratefully attributed to this Wikipedia Commons user.
Hi Tessa, I have a great sourdough recipe. My kids love it and have a hard time with regular bread, tastewise, when they’ve been enjoying the sourdough. It’s the best toasted. Yum! I can give you a start if you want. Grains supposedly contain phytic acid which, if untreated through fermentation, can actually combine with minerals in the intestines and block their absorption. So you get more minerals with sourdough, and I’ve heard it has a lower glycemic index than regular yeast breads.
Thanks so much, ember! I actually have the recipes from the class I took; does your include anything other than grain, water, salt and leaven? If so, please send it on over. Isn’t amazing what the leavening does to all that acid? I read is Weston Price’s most recent publication that they’ve even tested white flour sourdough and had it come out so much healthier than even whole grain, unleavened wheat bread! Plus, it tastes amazing!
Thanks for sharing! We use the Artisan in 5 Min. a day method and I like to use spelt flour. I loved this post and chose it as one of my features!
It is so crazy what has happened to our bread (and all the food we eat). I went to chef school and we learned how to make bread, but not “real” bread with natural yeast. That takes way to long to rise. They were preparing us to work in a commercial bakery where time is of the essence. If you can’t crank out food as fast at the other guys you are behind the times.
I have a freind who recently co authored a book about baking with natural yeast. I got a start from him. We now bake bread several times a week, and make wonderful pancakes and waffles. It is a natural sweet yeast, although you can let it sit longer and it will get a more sour flavor.
Here is a link to his blog where he tells why the comercial yeast is so bad for us. https://calebwarnock.blogspot.com/2012/06/natural-history-of-yeast-and-why-it.html
Whole grains are so important, yet we live in a world where you are looked at as strange and odd if you eat whole grains that are not prepackaged with big labels on the package telling you of its health benefits. We as a society have come to think that instant oatmeal with all its artifical flavorings is somehow healthy. I know tons of people who eat oatmeal and think that oats taste like glue unless it is all sweet and fixed up with all this stuff. At our home we make a millet and whole oat groat cereal mix that is so wonderful. All my relatives ask for it when they come stay at our home.
So often we think that we do not like whole grain foods because we have had some of those breads or cereals that taste like sandpaper. Just like people who think they don’t like veg because somewhere along the way they were served a pile of mushy overcooked yuck on a plate.
Thank you for helping get the word out about whole foods and this wonderful article.
I’ve heard of Caleb’s book but have yet to read it – it’s on my wishlist!
I have been making naturally leavened bread for a year now and LOVE it! I learned from several sources: World renowned naturally leavened bread maker Chad Robertsons’s Tartine books and youtubes (google it), The Art of Baking with Natural Yeast by Caleb Warnock and Melissa Richardson and my most recent and extremely helpful reading of this link: https://ranprieur.com/readings/natleavbread.html …which taught me to keep the dough cool as is rises to diminish greatly the sour taste. Making this bread has changed my life. Now I make all kinds of natural yeast products including bagels! So great.
Thanks for sharing, Shelli! I need to get the Richardson book – I’ve seen it several times. Ah, keeping it cool while it rises! The super sour taste is the only thing my kids don’t really care for and I’ve tried several things so thank you for the tip!
My husband is the bread maker in our house and I was just looking for heatlthy cookbooks.. thanks so much bringing your bread to foodie friday.
Two cookbooks have been my go-to books when I was learning about using natural leavening:
“Amy’s Bread”, and “Build Your Own Earth Oven”.
Both also contain recipes using commercial yeast. Amy’s Bread has a fantastic detailed section on getting a sourdough start going and using it. Detailed because as a commercial baker, she needs to have consistent results.
I don’t care so much about each batch being exactly the same, but I learned a ton from her.
The earth oven book has a super simple, laid-back recipe for making naturally raised bread.
So the two books worked perfectly for me – the one to learn al the details, the other to be able to just throw the dough together.
Plus building and using an earth oven is awesome.
Thank you for sharing those resources! I’ll be sure to look into them.