Critical Bread Co.

As a business, we see it as our responsibility to engage with and utilise products from agricultural methods that prioritise regenerative land and soil practices and support biodiverse ecologies. The UN’s Intergovernmental Science Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, 2019) overwhelmingly attributes unsustainable land use practices and biodiversity loss to agricultural practices. Conventional agriculture makes heavy use of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, insecticides and herbicides, single-crop 'monocultures' and intensive tillage methods. These methods are deeply problematic for the total environment because synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides—all different forms of poison—indiscriminately kill beneficial bees, insects, birds, mammals and micro-flora in the soil, therefore undermining biodiversity, while the poisonous runoff mixes into groundwater, rivers, lakes and the sea, creating toxic algae blooms and compromising drinking water and aquatic ecosystems. When combined with monoculture crop production and intensive tillage, soil fertility in conventional agriculture—briefly robust and high yielding because of synthetic fertiliser—is rapidly depleted, leading to top-soil erosion and the need to clear new land for growing (think: 'Amazon rainforest fires'). These conventional practices also degrade the taste and flavour of the products they yield, necessitating a food system that relies on sugar, salt and fat to achieve flavour and simultaneously endangering public health. Perhaps it goes without saying that these extractivist, self-reinforcing circumstances of industrial food systems are unsustainable in more ways than one.

While neither organic or agro-ecological methods are perfectly sustainable at this time, they represent two models of agriculture that offer a path toward more sustainable agricultural practices (IPBES, 2019, pp. 31-32) because they ban or strictly limit pesticide use, use organic fertilisers from human and animal wastes, practice multi-crop farming, conservative tillage methods. They also focus on utilising resources from within or nearby the farm to reduce fossil fuel reliance and enrich the overall ecological services of the farm. As a business we feel the responsibility, and have the pleasure, of offering a more sustainable food choice in purchasing flours that come from local and ecologically judicious farms and farmers to offer a rare or simply non-existent baked goods option—and one that doesn't compromise the health of our planet and our bodies.

INDUSTRIAL YEAST VS. SOURDOUGH: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

Sourdough. Mother. Root. Levain. Starter. The multitude of names is a tribute to the legacy of this continuous mixture of flour and water that hosts a complex culture of native yeasts and lactic acid bacteria that help bread to rise, make nutrients accessible, and deepen flavour. Indeed, it was sourdough—not yeast bought from a store—that helped enable the rise of the earliest large civilisations. The wild culture of sourdough is an inextricable part of human becoming, and each baker’s (or grandparent’s!) sourdough is microbially diverse. Each one holds clues, sensed through aroma, flavour, texture and looks, to the environmental factors that go into it: local geological and weather conditions, soil fertility, and the processing of flour into bread with a particular hand, using only 5 ingredients: water, salt, flour, yeast, and time.

Today, most bread is made with a laboratory-isolated strain of yeast, S. cerevisiae, stripped of any microbial diversity—of culture. This industrial technique, developed in 1872, ensures uniformity in production and taste, and was therefore ideal for industrialising the bread-making process. Consequently, the flavours of a particular baker and the ecological, geographical and geological influences on the grains and wild yeast cultures created and used by the baker, are lost. In this, we lose diversity and originality in taste, stripping us of an important cultural heritage. Moreover, the strength of industrial yeast means the bread rises quickly, preventing the yeast from fully pre-digesting the high gluten content of modern wheat. As recent research has shown, the incomplete fermentation of industrially produced breads limits the bioavailability of nutrients and is implicated in the rise of gluten-sensitivity (Gobetti et al., 2019; Hassani et al. 2016). The slow rise of sourdough, on the other hand, allows the yeast cultures to fully digest the gluten proteins. This makes the essential nutrients of the grains bioavailable, enriches the complexity of the flavour, and delivers a decidedly more satisfying eating experience.

The wild yeast sourdough culture at Critical Bread Co. is created from agro-ecological rye flour from Tyrnävän Mylly, and affords a taste that is at once antique and brand new, the same as it’s always been, and yet distinctively different.

Eat well. Eat critical.

Sincerely,

William LaFleur, Head Baker

Minae Tani, Owner

References:

Gobbetti, M., De Angelis, M., Di Cagno, R., Calasso, M., Archetti, G., & Rizzello, C. G. (2019). Novel insights on the functional/nutritional features of the sourdough fermentation. International Journal of Food Microbiology, 302, 103–113.

Hassani, A., Procopio, S., & Becker, T. (2016). Influence of malting and lactic acid fermentation on functional bioactive components in cereal-based raw materials: A review paper. International Journal of Food Science & Technology, 51(1), 14–22.

IPBES. 2019. Summary for policymakers of the global assessment report on biodiversity and ecosystem services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. S. Díaz, J. Settele, E. S. Brondizio E.S., H. T. Ngo, M. Guèze, J. Agard, A. Arneth, P. Balvanera, K. A. Brauman, S. H. M. Butchart, K. M. A. Chan, L. A. Garibaldi, K. Ichii, J. Liu, S. M. Subramanian, G. F. Midgley, P. Miloslavich, Z. Molnár, D. Obura, A. Pfaff, S. Polasky, A. Purvis, J. Razzaque, B. Reyers, R. Roy Chowdhury, Y. J. Shin, I. J. Visseren-Hamakers, K. J. Willis, and C. N. Zayas (eds.). IPBES secretariat, Bonn, Germany. XX pages.

Pollan, M. (2008). In defense of food: An eater’s manifesto. Penguin Press.