Gluten
Ever since I discovered the world's
fluffiest 100% whole wheat bread, white flour has seen little use
in our house. Every week or two, I'd put in an hour or so of
effort and then serve up bread which was nutritious and
delicious. Until the inevitable day of reckoning came --- the day
we ran out of gluten.
Gluten was discovered by 7th century Buddhist monks, who mixed flour
with water and kneaded until they extracted the protein (gluten) from
the starch. Their goal was to use the gluten as a meat
substitute, but other folks discovered that if you add the gluten back
into some other flour when making bread, you increase the protein
content of the bread and also increase the fluff by an order of
magnitude.
Of course, you
can't just pour gluten into your bread dough and expect to get the
world's fluffiest bread....
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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