We've all been there - you've baked some bread and it was so good, you're feeling guilty about eating it. But don't. I had a look at the nutritional profile of home baked bread and here's the thing - store bought bread has a lot of ingredients in it you probably don't even realise.
Here's an example - home-baked bread has:
- flour
- yeast
- sugar
- salt
Depending on which one you buy, supermarket bread has:
- flour
- soya beans
- grains
- wheat gluten
- yeast
- salt
- canola oil
- soy flour
- emulsifiers (E471 - mono and di-glycerides of fatty acids & E481 - sodium lactylate)
- acidity regulator (E263 - calcium acetate)
- vitamin (folic acid).
The biggest difference homemade bread will make in your diet is dietary fibre. The supermarket bread example was 5.2% dietary fibre. A quick calculation of the homemade bread with high protein (strong) flour was 2.7% dietary fibre which is quite low. What would really make the difference to your health would be to swap out some or all of the white flour for wholemeal flour which would bring the dietary fibre up to 11.2% - more than twice that of the supermarket bread, without the additional E numbers. The folate level also jumps up with the wholemeal flour too. Or you could use some linseeds instead if you can't find wholemeal flour.
So lean into the fact you've got time to bake, take small steps to increase the fibre content and enjoy!
