Bread is back

In recent years, bread’s reputation took some hard hits. It was maligned by health gurus who proclaimed carbohyrdates to be the biggest threat to health since saturated fats. Much like butter, however, bread is back with a vengeance. A listing of Facebook’s top food trends for 2019 shows that bread is leading the pack.

Part of bread’s return has to do with the embrace of alternative flours and long fermentation times. This so-called “slow carb baking” creates breads with a lower glycemic index and allows for better digestion. Watch for more of this buzzphrase to come in 2019. Bread’s resurgence can also be traced through the amazing baking books that have come out this year. Two of our recent giveaways are among those books – The Bread Collection by the Bake From Scratch crew, and  Holiday and Celebration Bread in Five Minutes a Day just in time for the season’s baking bonanza. 

Those two volumes only scratch the surface of the wonderful baking books with an emphasis on bread out in the past year or so. Jenny listed several in her guide to the best books of 2018. There’s the aptly-named Crusts (a word whose mentions on Facebook grew by three times from 2017 to 2018), along with Flour + Stone, and The Nordic Baking Book. For some of us, bread never really left (I’ve held onto my I ‘heart’ carbs shirt for over a decade), but the new wave of bread baking offers new and exciting possibilities for our favorite pastime of making and eating all manner of breads. Vive la bread!

Photo of Sourdough starter from The Bread Collection by Brian Hart Hoffman