Natural yeast and wheat intolerance

Good bread is good for you

Italy simply loves bread. Each Italian annually consumes an average of almost 70 kilos of it, almost double compared to the average British person! However only a very small percentage of Italians shows wheat intolerance, a far smaller percentage compare to the UK. Want to know why? The secret is all in the quality of what they eat. With more and more British people now turning to artisan breads, it’s time to make things clear.

Bread is one of the best loved and oldest foods created by humans. Archaeologists found starch residue on rocks used over 30,000 years ago for pounding plants and further studies revealed that fermentation was discovered more than 5,000 years ago by the Egyptians.

Did you know that the English word bread (common also in various forms to many other Germanic languages) derives from the root of the word brew? That’s because most bread (as beer does) contains yeasts, unicellular microorganisms (Saccharomycetes) that can convert carbohydrates to carbon dioxide and alcohols.

 

The history of yeast

When our ancestors made bread, they used wild sourdough yeast that was found on leaves, grapes and berries. They knew natural yeast would make their bread rise and drinks ferment. They also knew that gluten grains prepared this way made their digestion more efficient and provided their bodies with high amounts of nutrients. Using the wild sourdough yeast, our ancestors had to wait several hours for their bread to rise. Nothing really changed for thousands of years: this was the way you made bread.

Using a microscope, Louis Pasteur discovered in 1857 that yeast was a living organism. He found a way to isolate the yeast in pure culture form, and a way to make bread rise in only 30 minutes! This new yeast gave the commercial bread making industry its trigger. They called it commercial yeast.
The problem with commercial yeast is that, since it is the isolated version, it only artificially raises bread, expanding the gluten fibre net, without breaking down any of the phytic acid or anti-nutrients to aid with digestion.

The main cause of wheat intolerance: phytic acid

Grains have a special protection on them called phytic acid. The role of phytic acid is to prevent the grain from being digested, ensuring its survival for reproduction. We eat grain for the high quantity of nutrients, fibres, minerals and enzymes; however the human body doesn’t have the means to separate phytic acid and grain. We can’t get very much of the grain’s amazing nutrients unless the phytic acid is broken down before we eat it. Quite simple, isn’t it?
When a whole grain is ground into flour, then some nutrients are released. We do get benefits from eating whole grains plain, just not as much. But it also causes problems: all the phytic acid that we eat with that whole grain becomes an aggressor of the digestive tract. Phytic acid’s job is to “hold on to nutrients” until its death. And it won’t simply protect you from having all that fibre, nutrients, mineral and enzymes! It will start snatching up any available nutrients it can find! It will even steal nutrients from other food currently in your digestive tract. Our digestive system can become really upset from all the chaos phytic acid created! This is the main cause of what we commonly call wheat intolerance, which many people have to some degree depending on their sensitivity.

How to avoid most wheat intolerances? You guessed right, eat bread with only natural yeast!

To conclude, natural yeast has several health benefits that you simply can’t get from commercial yeast:
1. Natural yeast breaks down harmful enzymes in grains.
2. Natural yeast takes the nutrition in grains – vitamins and minerals – and makes them easily available for digestion.
3. Natural yeast converts dough into a digestible food source that will not trigger your body’s defences. It predigests sugars for diabetics, breaks down gluten for the intolerant, and turns calcium-leaching phytic acid into a cancer-fighting antioxidant.

These are some of the reasons why at Tigellae we only use and bake bread, focaccia and pizza made with 100% natural yeast. They also taste a lot better too!

Next time in this section of the Tigellae Blog I’ll talk about some of the different kind of bread common in Italy, their origins and often funny names. Know your dough!

Giordano