Yeast Free Rye Bread?

My current obsession with rye is catching up with the other major food obsession, cole slaw specifically but honestly, brassica anything. R. is wondering why I haven't just bought a huge bag of rye to make my own rye bread. I dunno. Sounds like a lot of work to me.

In the meantime, I've bought a couple small loaves of Storye at Whole Foods, because it looked about like something I remembered from when I was my son's age, and a decent deli finally arrived near where I grew up and my dad was excited to introduce us to things like Edam and Gouda and Cervelat (boy, the cervelat thing stuck -- whenever I got to the Netherlands, I eat a lot of that).

The Storye bread makes some claims about having no yeast/no added yeast/being yeast free. This is present on the product and on the website. I'm a little skeptical of claims like this, because I believed (it turns out erroneously) that if you make some kind of grain and water or potato and whatever starter, ferment it and then use it to make a bread rise, you've just corralled a bunch of wild yeast.

It is, actually, not that simple.

Here is an NPR piece about Appalachia "salt rising" bread (no salt involved in the rise, duh); the rising agent is stuff like Clostridium perfringens.

I don't know what Storye is corralling. The bread is tasty, close to but not identical to what I remember. I'm a little worried about the claim of 9 g of fiber per slice, given that I foolishly just had a two slice sandwich (maybe I should have just had one and cut it in half).

Kids These Days, They Have No Sense of History

http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/06/us/declassified-ana-montes-american-spy-profile/

"Instead, Montes memorized details from sensitive documents and then — when she got home — typed them from memory onto her laptop."

Sure she did. From 1985 until when she was arrested just after the 9/11 attacks. Yup. Def typing shit into a laptop. And then -- this is the best part -- transferring the data from the laptop to an encrypted disk. I suspect she was actually using a desktop PC during the first decade and maybe switched to a laptop towards the end of the period.

CNN has absolutely no excuse for this kind of error. This website is considerably less reputable; I was there pursuing a question about what exactly is responsible for the rise of Storye rye bread (what are they corralling exactly: bacteria, yeast or something else?).

http://www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/can-celiacs-eat-true-sourdough-bread/

This is the specific claim that triggered my, "really?! Really?!":

"When baker’s yeast was first introduced as an alternative to sourdough starters in 1668 in France, it was strongly rejected because scientists at the time already knew that it would negatively impact people’s health."

Yes, scientists were definitely the people objecting to baker's yeast in 1668 in France. No. It was actually medical doctors on the Faculty of Medicine of Paris University. And they were, technically, complaining about the use of brewer's yeast in making bread -- it wouldn't be called baker's yeast until _after_ bread made with added yeast took off. So you could call the objectors doctors. You could call them academics. You could call them consultants to the king. But anyone who complains about rotting water is tough for me to accept as a "scientist".

I get that you might be thinking, yeah, but that's not a Kids These Days, that's something else entirely. But the _specific_ issue I have is a Kids These Days issue. Whoever wrote that honest to goddess thinks there was an influential category of people that could be called "scientists" present in France in 1668.

Which there was not. Encyclopedists. Dilettantes. Rich fucks who stole ideas from mechanics and miners. And none of them were involved in this controversy anyway.

To be fair, neither of these errors is nearly egregious as that ridiculous thing about how in the 1980s a bunch of anarchist/socialists in Silicon Valley invented the PC or whatever ... on their laptops. I don't really get how people manage to pretzel fairly simple historical timelines so badly, but they do.

ETA: Also, as long as I'm here: those Frenchies were a little backwards anyway.

http://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/files/1313/9024/6790/Rose_chapter.pdf

"According to an Amsterdam ordinance of 1652, the yeast for bread baking had to be unadulterated, just the way it came from the brewer, and measured with a verified and approved measure. In Leiden in the middle of the seventeenth century, yeast was sold in a gist-huis, or “yeast-storage house,” but numerous petitions made clear that the bakers preferred to obtain their yeast directly from the brewery."

The Dutch had apparently worked their way through all of these issues 15 or more years before Quatorze was asking the medical academics to get into the argument he was having with one of his personal doctors about whether he could eat the light fluffy bread or not (I seriously doubt that bread made with brewers' yeast was where Quatorze's diet needed to be modified. But I wasn't there, now was I?).

Saturday's Activities Include: Whole Foods, library, worksheets, El Huipil

My MIL went off to the second day of her painting class today. That was really early. Then T. and I got up to go to Whole Foods. After we got home, I started laundry and the dishwasher and then we went to the library. He read a few pages of a book by an author whose last name has the same first letter as his last name (criteria on take home worksheet from inclusion class); I read the rest to him. It was by Graham Oakley, about some church mice. Kind of fun. There are apparently a bunch of books about these mice.

After the library he played briefly at the adjacent playground, but it was hot so we went back home. R. went for a walk. Then R. and T. went to El Huipil for lunch. Now, A. is working on worksheets from her summer take home stuff. She also discovered that the Disney souvenir bought several trips ago is actually a school supplies case with colored pencils, markets and similar items in it. She wanted me to put it in the bag for next fall with the rest of her school supplies. Seems reasonable to me.

I expect later T. and I will go to Pub on the Common while R. and his mother have the ribeyes I bought today.

A. has generalized her skill with headphones. Now, she will watch TV with the headphones, not just use headphones with her iPad. Also, she has found the much nicer noise reduction (not noise canceling, but really good noise reduction) headphones and is using those with the iPad. We have wireless headphones that we use with the TV originally bought when the kids were little and we didn't want to wake them up but we still wanted to watch our evening TV (or we wanted to watch something where what was on screen was unobjectionable, but the language was not for very small children). But it's nice, because now you can watch something while hanging out with other people who _don't_ want to watch that. And you don't have to accept a small screen size to do so. I know people hate headphones/ear buds and the social isolation that can result, but from my perspective, a little social isolation is better than making people go to their own room and close the door. Which is a LOT of social isolation.