For the Love of Bread

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[gentle music]

[Hannah] Bread is deeply nostalgic

and tied to so many memories.

It's such an evocative food.

[Nafissatou] You can have it sweet, you can have it salty.

[Karen] It's just tangy and delicious.

[Ron] It's the coolest thing ever

to take this carbohydrate and turn it into

protein that allows for human existence.

[Marion] Crunchy on the outside

and elastic on the inside, smelling of yeast, I love it.

Anyone can make bread and that's fantastic,

but making really, really good bread is really hard.

People spend years perfecting their breadmaking technique.

[moves into upbeat music]

I like it to get a lot of color.

Not too much dark, but really brown.

But some people doesn't like that.

Some people like it darker than me.

Depend on who is baking it and how you love it.

Every food culture uses grain.

Grain is a food that expands

and it's natural that people would base their diet

on a food that actually gives you more

than the sum of its parts.

This is why its such an important part of people's diets,

because it's economical, it's sustainable.

Bread can be made on three ingredients,

right, flour, water, and salt,

but there are a couple other considerations

that I think are crucial to really making

a perfect loaf of bread,

and making the same loaf of bread every time,

and that's temperature and time.

Certain doughs will like to ferment at a certain temperature

and certain doughs might be warmer or cooler

and certain doughs are very, very fast,

but understanding how those two variables fit

in to the baking process are crucial to making good bread.

So it takes discipline, it takes intuition,

and it takes a lot of practice.

The longer we ferment a grain,

the easier it is for our bodies to break it down.

There's something called phytic acid

that's naturally present in grain

and can inhibit the body from absorbing

certain vitamins and minerals.

When you use a sourdough base in a bread,

the acid in the sourdough neutralizes

the effect of the phytic acid and,

in essence, makes the bread healthier for you.

So in order to make a loaf of sourdough bread,

you need a starter, which is a live culture.

And that's its own incredibly fascinating thing,

because it's alive, and you can pass it on.

A neighbor actually brought the starter

in when we first opened.

It's like, this is my family's starter,

we have sourdough pancakes that we've been doing

for generations, so it's third generation from her,

and then we've just been using it ever since.

It's got to be at least a hundred years old.

Our sourdough came from the Klondike in Canada,

and it was started in like, 1896.

And so it's a very nourishing thing

that this bacteria's being passed all over the world

and sort of showing up on people's tables.

It's like you're eating history.

It's incredible to think that you're eating something

that was made with an ingredient that is alive

and that has been alive longer than you have.

[Narrator] Bread is the foundation of our daily meals.

It's the number one food on the tables

of people all over the world.

A few years ago, Oprah came out

with an ad for Weight Watchers.

She's one of their spokespeople.

It was just this very simple, short video,

in which she said--

This is the joy for me.

I love bread.

I love bread. Really, the message is that

it's okay to eat bread [laughs],

which I think people really responded to.

I think it resonated because bread

has been very villainized.

Atkins diet books have sold in the millions,

in Britain second only to sales of Harry Potter books.

I was a teenager at the height of the Atkins diet,

so that was like, the early aughts.

To me it seemed like a worldwide phenomenon,

this idea that carbs should be avoided at all cost,

and I remember watching people scoop out bagels.

That was such a poignant image.

Low carbohydrate diets go as far back

as anybody was writing about diets.

People have always talked about not eating

too many foods with carbohydrates, because they taste good,

people like them, and tend to eat a lot of them.

But I think the current carbohydrate craze came

when obesity became a big problem in American society,

and that started in about 1980.

That was when the number of calories

in the food supply increased dramatically

and went from about 3,000 a day per person

to about 4,000 a day.

If you're a food company, you've got to sell food

in that kind of an environment,

and that's when calories started getting pushed on us.

People became very concerned about dieting.

Well, I'm especially suspicious of the Paleo diet,

given that humans in the Paleolithic period

didn't live that long, so the idea that eating in that way

will extend your life seems slightly suspect to me.

Well, when I hear about the Paleo diet,

I think the people who invented it

didn't really know very much about

what people ate 50,000 years ago, because guess what?

We can't even figure out what people ate yesterday.

Nobody wants to read, eat your veggies

and balance your calories.

That's so boring.

But everybody loves diet books that have simple solutions.

[Narrator] Formerly, most bread was made in the home,

but it took experience and a lot of hard work

to turn out good bread every time.

There's definitely good bread and there's bad bread.

I grew up with bad bread.

It was supermarket packaged white bread

loaded with additives, no fermentation,

lots of sugars and artificial ingredients,

and that bread is not good for people

and I think a lot of us grew up with bread like that,

and maybe still eat bread like that

and so yeah, it's making us sick.

This is a manufactured, commercial bread.

The bran and the germ have been removed

from the flour that made this bread.

That makes it less nutritious,

but it makes its texture more pleasing to a lot of people.

It has an ingredient list that must have

50 ingredients in it.

A really good bread only requires five ingredients.

Soft, delicious, nutritious, an American classic.

It's what it is.

[Hannah] There's definitely been an explosion

of bread fanatics on Instagram,

particularly sourdough has become a real hobby for people.

There's really kind of no end to the experimenting

and noodling you can do, and it's pretty wonky.

You can get really, really into it.

[bread thuds]

Oh, you hear that, Vinny?

Sounds like your cabeza.

I do think carbs are making a comeback.

Bread has become a menu item in a way

that it didn't use to be.

It's really an art, and to me,

it's one of the best parts of a meal if it's done well.

Will the vilification of carbs continue?

I hope not.

I wish people could enjoy what they eat

and not worry about this so much.

As the world has gotten more chaotic,

as the news has gotten worse and worse,

people are looking for things to throw themselves into

and I think making bread is a really tactile experience

that really requires a lot of focus and time,

and I think it's sort of the ultimate hobby for our age,

in a way, that you really have to turn off.