Great sourdough bread employs the Real 7™, including wild yeast, heirloom wheat, good nutrition, pure water, real salt, honest flavor, and real-world tradition. But why are so many people having bread issues when humans have been eating bread for thousands of years?
Look around at the folks you know. You’ll see some pretty big issues, like Celiac disease and gluten intolerance. You’ll also have friends with bread-related blood sugar spikes or who get bloated or quickly gain weight from eating extra carbs. You may have foodie friends for whom the biggest issue is the cardboard flavor of most commercial bread.
If it’s so bad, why would humans keep eating this stuff?
Modern Bread vs The Real™ Sourdough Bread
Today, most people don’t eat the same bread humans have eaten for thousands of years. Your great-grandma may have never tasted this new cardboard flavor because baking changed about 150 years ago by introducing time-saving and nutrient-reducing additives, and real bread almost became extinct.
When we talk about “real” bread, we are talking about real “sourdough” bread. Now, if you’re thinking, “I’ve bought sourdough bread from the supermarket, and I don’t really like it,” don’t worry. That’s not what we’re talking about.
Others may think, “Oh, like in San Francisco—it’s gourmet, yummy bread and I love to eat it.” That’s part of it, but there’s way more to sourdough than that. In fact, sourdough is what we call it in America, but real sourdough is eaten all over the world—and it doesn’t even have to be sour. In many countries, it is simply called “bread,” as it has been called for millennia.
Today, finding “real” sourdough can be tricky. When you see bread labeled “sourdough,” it’s usually regular modern bread with a sour flavor added to hide the cardboard taste and nutritionless ingredients. Once you know the secrets of real sourdough, you’ll be able to take simple steps to transform the flavor and nutrition of your diet.
Abigail’s Oven, The Real 7™, and the Real Bread Revolution
The number one of The Real 7™ is real yeast. This is because it is crucial to making real bread. Everything revolves around real yeast.
You have likely heard the terms natural leavening, wild yeast, and sourdough starter. All of those terms mean the same thing. Real yeast is a mixture of flour and water that is fed flour and water every day for about two weeks until it becomes a living mass of microorganisms that are feeding and growing. This is nothing like the little packets of yeast you buy at the store.
Natural leavening began in Egypt 5,000 years ago. It is no coincidence that the Egyptians also discovered beer. Sourdough bread is, basically, fermented grain.
(Here Martha Levie shows students Active Sourdough Starter in one of her free classes.)
In her classes, Martha explains, “My mom grew up making bread, and she passed the tradition on to me. We never bought bread in the store. We made bread like most of our grandmas did, using commercial yeast and a mix of white and wheat flour with all the dough enhancers that went with it.
“One day, my entrepreneurial daughter Abigail came to me wanting to sell bread. Knowing she was young enough that I’d end up doing all the work, I said no. She asked if she could do it when she was older and I agreed that when she could do the whole process herself, she could sell bread. Well, she hit ten and said, “Mom, I can make bread now.”
“She took a red wagon and her little brothers and they went door to door selling bread. She loved talking to people and keeping track of her business on spreadsheets. She had 300 customers at one point who had signed up for a monthly, bimonthly, or weekly bread delivery. She had to give up the wagon and accept rides from my husband Allen.
“We moved to Virginia and later came back to Utah. Allen had a job he loved, but they wanted him to stay in a cubicle doing research and he was withering away. He missed meaningful interaction.
“So he came home and said, ‘I’m going to quit. We’re going to take Abigail’s Oven and make it our family business.’ After making sure he was certain, I said, ‘Okay, we’re going to do this.’ It’s been difficult but also amazing for our family.
“When we started, we made standard commercially yeasted bread, just like I had my entire life. Early on, someone pulled us aside and suggested we try an older bread-making method. We were intrigued, so we took some training and started experimenting with real sourdough bread.
“Customers raved about it. The bread was significantly healthier, and customers loved the taste and texture. At that point, we said, ‘Why are we making anything else?’
“Ever since, we’ve been baking real sourdough bread at Abigail’s Oven. The positive response from our customers has led to further research and more incredible results, including solutions to many bread issues people face. Through this process, we developed the Real-7™ method to take back bread as part of our human heritage.
“By following the Real-7 method, you’ll participate in a bread revolution sweeping the world. You’ll also eat delicious and nutritious bread that will start healing you and your family.
The Real 7
Seven key factors have made a true sourdough loaf a delicious and healthy staple for thousands of years.
1. Real Yeast
As the story goes, Egyptians left some wet meal out in the sun, and it started to bubble up and ferment. When they baked it, they ended up with a nice raised loaf, unlike all the flatbread they’d made before. This sourdough starter became the first leavening agent.
For centuries, humans used this natural leavening. Then, in the mid-1800s, things began to change as bakers looked for easier and faster ways to make bread.
After Louis Pasteur proved his theory of germs in 1881 and identified yeast as a living organism, companies started making baker’s yeast. Now, what most of us think of as yeast is a lab-created product without any wild bacteria. Until about 20 years ago, the market was dominated entirely by baker’s yeast, and real sourdough starters were rare.
We’re now seeing a comeback of things fermented like kombucha, kimchi, sauerkraut, and kefir.
How does real yeast work? When you mix flour and water, you are combining the wild yeast and wild bacteria that are in the air all around us, on our hands, and on the grain. The sourdough start gives them a great place to congregate. It’s like a little condo for wild yeast and bacteria to live, eat, and grow.
Ideally, your starter should ferment for at least eight hours. During this time, the wild yeast eats the sugars in the flour and spits out carbon dioxide and ethanol, creating bubbles that raise the starter. Then, the bacteria consume the sugars and starches and spit out two liquids—lactic acid and acetic acid.
The lactic acid and acetic acid give sourdough its characteristic tangy, sour flavor, but these acids do things much more miraculous than that; they take the gluten and other irritants in wheat and start breaking them down in your gut but at a much slower than the usual rate. This means with real sourdough, you don’t have that big blood sugar spike. We often hear from diabetics who say they can eat true sourdough when they haven’t been able to eat bread for years. These acids make all your bread’s fiber, vitamins, and minerals easier to digest.
The benefits go beyond the bread. You’ll also have these acids to digest everything you’re eating. Eating a slice of sourdough bread with every meal may even lower the glycemic index of everything else you eat within four hours.
Dan Buettner authored a book called The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, describing all the places in the world that have the highest longevity rate, the highest happiness, and the highest health. One of these zones is in Greece, where they eat sourdough bread. The Greeks interviewed for the book explained that their long lives could be attributed to their habit of eating bread with every single meal.
This may also be a compounding process. If you eat a slice of sourdough bread with every meal for ten years, you may be less likely to have a wide range of health issues.
Natural yeast and bacteria do amazing things for you. This specific type of yeast, called lactobacilli, is only found in sourdough bread. When we switched from natural yeast to baker’s yeast, we also started eating flour that hadn’t had all the irritants broken down before digestion. Now, we see people having all sorts of issues with eating grain. This is the state of modern bread because we’ve moved away from natural leavening.
2-Real Wheat
Number two of The Real 7™ is real wheat. You may have noticed wheat’s reputation deteriorating over the last 20 years. More and more people have noticed that they don’t feel well when they eat wheat. It has even gone so far that some health writers are telling people what is toxic and they shouldn’t consume it at all.
But wait. If wheat is toxic, how have we survived on it as a staple for thousands of years?
The people who settled in our state 170 years ago ate wheat daily and didn’t report any bread-related issues. Wheat was usually what kept them alive. It has been a healthy staple for thousands of years. So why can’t we eat wheat now?
As we started investigating, we discovered that the first major changes to wheat started during colonial times with the discovery of gluten. This amazing substance glues things together and is only found in wheat. Our colonial parents theorized that if a little gluten was good, a lot of gluten would be great, so we started hybridizing wheat to have a higher gluten content.
After World War Two, starvation became a real issue for a devastated world. People looked for ways to increase food production to mass levels. We moved away from small family farms to produce thousands of pounds of food. Today, we have massive corn, soy, and wheat farms that feed millions of people.
As part of this effort, farmers and scientists started hybridizing grain at a rapid rate. This hybridization is not genetic modification; that came later. Hybridization is just the natural process of taking two strains of wheat and mixing them, kind of like grafting trees. The baby wheat has 95% of the characteristics of the parent strain, but 5% are unique to that strain of wheat, creating something new. Some scientists think that our modern wheat has been hybridized over 22,000 times, and that may be a low estimate.
As more issues have arisen with this hybridized wheat, more nutritionists and doctors have spoken out against it. One study found modern wheat passes the blood-brain barrier and gives you an addictive buzz like caffeine. Because of this, we consume 400 more calories of wheat a day than we did historically. Others say the digestion problems come from our bodies not even recognizing this new wheat as food.
So what can we do? At Abigail’s Oven, we like to bake using non-GMO, older, chemical-free wheat strains. The older the strain, the better we feel about its quality. We’ve also seen good results even with older strains of hard white wheat, which is in itself a newer wheat type because it is less hybridized than some varieties.
3- Real Nutrition
We will take some of these things further as we discuss number three of The Real 7™—real nutrition.
In our bakery, we use flour that is unbleached, unbromated, and unfortified. The United States still allows flour to be bleached with chemicals, though the process has been illegal in Europe for years. Doctors may still debate this, but we choose not to use bleached flour.
Bromated flour is less common, but potassium bromate is still an additive to many flours since it can improve the rise and elasticity of the dough. Unfortunately, it may also be linked to cancer. You don’t need these dough conditioner benefits with sourdough, so you don’t have to take the risk.
Fortified flour sounds great, in theory. But as flour is sifted to remove the bran and germ, it also loses much of its nutritional value.
The government wanted millers to make their flour more nutritious, so they started adding zinc, copper, and iron and calling the flour fortified. Unfortunately, they didn’t use plant-based minerals, which are easy for our bodies to absorb. Instead, they used easily accessible metal shavings.
When Allen asked our grain supplier about getting unfortified grain, the supplier asked why he’d want to do that. Allen described the metal additives, and our supplier was shocked. So he went to the mill and asked them about it. They took the lid off a barrel and showed him the iron shavings and their mixing process with the flour. The miller even pulled out a giant magnet, waved it over the barrel, and showed off the shavings You can do this yourself if you get an iron-fortified cereal. Mash the grains, soak them in water for a day, then pull out a magnet.
Historically, humans have gotten minerals through plants and animals. Plants naturally pull minerals up from the ground through their roots. When we eat the plant (or the animal that ate the plant), we get these minerals in a more digestible form.
You want flour that is unfortified, but that also hasn’t had essential nutrients removed through sifting and bleaching. The flour we use is milled really well so that it looks like white flour, but it hasn’t been sifted. When baking, it behaves like white flour in important ways, but the bran and the germ are still there.
You want real wheat that has not been genetically modified and is chemical-free. You want flour that hasn’t been bleached, bromated, or fortified. When you take real flour and real yeast and combine it, you get an incredibly nutritious product.
Wheat naturally has several vitamin B, folic acid, and other vital nutrients. However, it is difficult for us to access these nutrients without fermenting or sprouting the wheat. One reason may be phytic acid, which is heavy in wheat and may deter bugs and pests. Unfortunately, it also inhibits your body from absorbing nutrients, vitamins, and minerals. Fermenting and sprouting process wheat’s phytic acid and unlock those nutrients.
You may have noticed an increased interest in fermentation lately. People especially love discussing probiotics—the bacteria you need for a healthy gut. People ask us if sourdough has probiotics since it is fermented. The answer is no because lactobacilli die at 140 degrees, and we bake our bread to an internal temperature of 200°F. But fermented sourdough bread is a powerful prebiotic, which is food to probiotics. It’s kind of like fertilizer for your probiotics to thrive.
When you eat sourdough, that prebiotic goes down into your gut and it feeds the probiotics you already have and helps them thrive. For probiotics, look at kimchi, sauerkraut, or kefir, and then feed them with your prebiotic sourdough.
4- Real Water
Number four of The Real 7™ is real water. The water that comes out of your tap may have lots of issues that will affect your bread. One of the biggest problems for sourdough is chlorine.
A few years ago, you could just let your water sit out overnight, and the chlorine would evaporate, but now treatment plants are adding chloramine, which doesn’t evaporate. If you have a water softener, the bacteria don’t react well.
But if you have extra hard water, you’ll get a really dense, heavy loaf of bread. You shouldn’t use distilled water because it has all the minerals removed that the bacteria need to react to. The best way to ensure a consistent, nutritious loaf of sourdough is to use spring or filtered purified water.
5- Real Salt
Number five of The Real 7™ is real salt. Salt, like wheat, tends to get a bad rap. Nutritionists and doctors encourage low-sodium diets, especially for people with heart problems. If we’re talking about white table salt, which has been bleached and stripped of minerals, I agree with them. Please avoid that kind of salt.
Our bodies contain saltwater. In fact, your body needs salt to function. But that doesn’t mean that all salt is created equal. Redmond Real Salt, harvested locally in Redmond, Utah, is a fabulous pink salt with 81 minerals.
Unlike table salt, Redmond salt is good for you. If you feel a cold coming on and you gargle with this salt, it’ll help kill the harmful bacteria in your throat. Drinking water with just a bit of natural salt is more hydrating than Gatorade. This is the kind of salt you want for your bread.
People are sometimes surprised that our bread has almost a tablespoon of salt per loaf. When they ask if we could make it without salt, we say no for two reasons. First, it would taste bad. Even the Bible disparages “salt that has lost its savor.” You want that flavor in there.
Second, sourdough doesn’t require oil, sugar, extra gluten flour, or anything we used to do to make bread rise and taste good. Sourdough does, however, need salt because sourdough bacteria can be a little erratic once it’s in the dough. If you have hotter pockets in your dough, the bacteria will process that area faster. Salt is a preservative, so when you add it to your sourdough it slows the bacteria down and helps them evenly process your dough.
Redmond isn’t the only readily available real salt. You can use Himalayan pink salt, Celtic sea salt, and others. Just ensure you’re sourcing something that is good quality, less processed, and natural.
6- Real Flavor
Number six of The Real 7™ is real flavor. Just look at these people enjoying good bread. But…
Have you ever gone to the grocery store and bought tomatoes to make a really good sandwich? They look great. You take them home, and what do they taste like? Cardboard. If you’re lucky enough to find locally grown heirloom tomatoes, it’s a completely different experience. They may not look perfect—they’ve got lumps and bumps and cracks, and they’re all different sizes—but they taste amazing.
Many people buy produce at the store with a vow to eat healthy, only to find that the food doesn’t taste great. So, in our minds, healthy food is equated with awful taste, and junk food or fast food is equated with a delicious taste. We must suffer through awful taste to eat better, lose weight, or get healthy. In reality, if you eat truly nutritious foods, they burst with flavor. We often don’t realize this in America because we live in a packaged world of convenience.
If you go to most grocery stores and buy fresh produce, it’s likely not taste that great. These are products grown to look good and not bruise. They may have been picked green and grown with pesticides in depleted soils. Modern produce is a result of our industrial, “pump it out as fast as we can,” culture.
If you go to other countries, their food is often amazingly flavorful. You don’t have to eat a ton of it to feel full. Many of the foods in America are so nutrient-deficient that we’re eating ourselves to death and never feeling satisfied.
Real flavor is found in real sourdough bread. The fermentation process brings out unique flavors that can improve the second day.
Engineered flavor, on the other hand, is fleeting. Take spicy chips, for example. You eat a chip, and the MSG opens up your taste buds, and you get a surge of flavor, but then it’s gone fast (try chewing for 30 seconds and notice how it tastes). After the first chip, what do you want? You want more. So you eat another and another one, and you don’t feel satisfied. The flavor is engineered to be that way—to create a craving so you want to keep eating.
When you eat real food, you get real flavor and real nutrition. That’s my favorite part about sourdough bread. It’s delicious, and it’s good for you.
7- Real World Tradition
Number seven of The Real 7™ is real-world tradition. My family never bought store bread. As a child, you often want what you don’t have. Watching TV, I would see white bread, which I dreamily thought of as “American bread.” I always wanted white bread and my dad would never let us buy it.
Finally, as a teenager, I attended an event where they had popular white bread. I was so excited. It was like in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, when Toula goes to school and all the other girls eat white bread sandwiches and she’s got her Greek food, which tastes way better, but for some reason, she wants the white bread sandwiches.
Well, I made a sandwich, and I took a bite. I remember the bread flattening out paper-thin and sticking to the roof of my mouth. There was really no flavor. I thought, “My mom’s bread is way better than this. Why do people eat this garbage?” But flavorless white bread has sadly become part of our American culture of wanting things fast and easy.
Fast and easy have their benefits. We technically have all kinds of extra time to do what we want because we don’t need to make all our necessities ourselves. Everything we do is outsourced— homes, clothes, even walking our dogs and taking care of our pets. But with the convenience, we’ve lost parts of our traditions and culture.
I have amazing memories of making bread with my family growing up. I gained valuable skills and a mindset of taking care of myself. When I went to college, I took a big metal bowl and I made my own bread. All my roommates loved me because we had homemade bread.
There’s something about doing things together as a family that nourishes us. There is power in teaching your children that it’s important to do things for ourselves and do them right and do them well, even if it takes extra time. These values will help heal a lot of the problems we see in our culture. We want to bring back that real-world tradition of doing things together that nourish and build and are sustainable, like preparing and enjoying real food.
With today’s increasing diversity, real tradition can also bring us closer together. We need a bread revolution where bakers and consumers come together to create foods that are delicious and nourishing. Let’s revive the real-world tradition of taking time to make and eat high-quality, nutritious food. You’ll see and feel and taste the difference.
This is one of the most powerful things you can learn from the Real 7. Life isn’t just about numbers—how inexpensive, how profitable, or how fast something is. We need to look at our quality of life. A meal may have low calories, but what is the quality of those calories? Is it real? How was it made? We hope we have given you some of these real answers. There are all kinds of real foods that connect us to our past. We think bread is one of the biggest ones.
We hope you can now connect with real yeast, real wheat, real nutrition, real water, real salt, real flavor, and a real tradition of quality and connection to real food. We invite you to be a part of this bread revolution. Take back what used to be woven into everyday life, what we took for granted but will never take for granted again because of what we have been through.
Join us in this peaceful, delicious bread revolution using the Real-7 approach.
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