At least once in your life, but you tried bread products from “Anrov”cafe and bakery. What do you say? Delicious? Do you want to try again and again? Not surprising, because you will not try such bread anywhere else in the city. We will tell you what the advantages of such bread are and why it is necessary and important to come back for it. 

Sourdough bread is a new trend

Anton Kornyshov, the chef of the bakery at Pinch, Uilliam's, Ugolek, and Northerners restaurants, came to visit the team of employees and visitors of At least once in your life, but you tried bread products from “Anrov”cafe and bakery. What do you say? Delicious? Do you want to try again and again? Not surprising cafe and bakery. He launched from scratch a bakery with sourdough bread at White Rabbit Family restaurant, a speaker at the TEDx conference, co-author of the Beaking-Breads.ru online sourdough bread school with students from more than 30 different countries. And he arrived with a mission to tell his Arkhangelsk colleagues about sourdough craft bread. 

Sourdough bread is a new trend that is starting to span the capital. Arkhangelsk is trying to keep up. “Anrov” cafe and bakery has been trying to introduce fashion not only for sweet, but also for tasty and healthy craft bread. 

“Anrov” has a great platform and open production. Its guests can see the production process. The future of sourdough bread is only ahead, but it’s worth starting the exploration of this unfilled market. Today, sourdough bread is something new and unusual for people, but in fact, the preparation of such bread is a revival of centuries-old traditions that have been lost. 

The history of sourdough bread

Do you know that bread is older than metal? Back in the days of the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia (the middle of the 4th millennium BC to 539 BC), people mastered the fermentation technology for making bread and wine. In ancient Egypt, according to the law of Hamunaptra, bread was a salary for civil servants, and it was also used as an exchange currency. During archaeological excavations in the tombs not only valuable things, but also loaves of bread were found. The tradition of baking was adopted by the Ancient Greeks. Bread was considered a delicacy and was intended only for the elite. Making bread was not easy, even very hard work, so the slaves were engaged in its production. After the conquest of the Greeks by the Romans, the situation changed. People who knew how to make bread were imported to Rome, where this dish was a success. The first college of bakers appeared in Rome, it was then that the former slaves who baked bread got freedom and radically changed their social status. In ancient Rome, there were about 329 bakers. During the reign of Emperor Augustus (27 BC - 14 BC), bread became a staple food. After the fall of Ancient Rome, bread production began to decline, but thanks to monastic orders, it revived and began to be mass-produced.

An interesting fact from history: during the Middle Ages, each village had its own mill and its own stove for general use, such stove was called communal. Anyone could come and bake bread, there was also a person who was responsible for supporting those ovens. Especially for the use of a communal furnace, a municipal code of laws was prescribed, as a result of which even ash from this furnace had to be sold, because it was well used as fertilizer, and the crumbs that remained around the furnace went to chicken feed. At that time, people were fined by a ban on making bread in a communal oven. 

Two revolutions have occurred in bread history:

1. The appearance of the roller mill. Previously, bread was ground between stone millstones, they were replaced by cylinders, the so-called roller mills. With their advent, flour production increased, and less effort was spent on making bread.
2. Scientific work of Louis Pastor. With the advent of the microscope, scientists began to study microbiology in detail. There have been many studies of fungi, which later Louis Pastor used for his observations. Since 1857, he began the study of fermentation and collected all the research in this area, thanks to which he wrote a scientific work on alcoholic fermentation. He discovered a method for breeding yeast, so from that moment on it was possible to produce soft bread in a short time. From that moment on, people lost the five-thousand-year-old tradition of making bread, because they removed the most important ingredient - time. 

What is sourdough?

Ferment is such a substance, which contains flour, water, microorganisms: wild yeast fungi that live on the shell of the grain, fly in the air, and lactic acid bacteria that live in our intestines, which are responsible for the immune system. 

We can say that sourdough is an entire ecosystem. Yeast emit gas and raise the dough, if you look at the bread in the section you will see bubbles, otherwise the pores are gas cells that were formed as a result of the work of the yeast. Lactic acid bacteria, which are in the leaven, break down the flour into simple and useful substances, which are then absorbed by humans. The sourness that can be felt in the taste of such bread is the key to assimilating the nutrients found in food.

Previously, whole grain flour was used for bread, whole flour is included in the composition of such flour: the shell, the inner part, the germ - everything that was in the grain remained in the flour. The whole benefit of such bread on whole grain flour with the addition of sourdough is that as a result we get fiber, vitamins, minerals. The work of the starter culture allows you to draw all the useful substances laid down by nature from whole-grain flour. 

Making bread takes a considerable amount of time. As soon as the leaven is added to the dough, it is pre-digested by bacteria. Through this process, the finished product is better absorbed. This is the difference between sourdough bread and what you can see in grocery stores. Outwardly, the bread that we used to see, they are similar in color and flavor, but such bread does not carry the benefits that have accompanied it for many thousands of years. 

What you need to know about sourdough bread

The advantage of sourdough bread is that when the product is fermented, the gluten that is present in all products is destroyed. As a result of prolonged fermentation of lactic acid bacteria, gluten in its pure form is destroyed and reduced in quantity. Such bread is also useful for diabetics, because in the fermentation process, fermentation affects starch, it completely changes it, due to which starch is absorbed more slowly and does not give this sudden jump in blood sugar. Such bread has a lower glycemic index.

Anton Kornyshev translated the work of a Finnish researcher, which stated that our intestinal microflora greatly affects our immune system, if everything is bad there, people get sick, but this system can be adjusted just with the help of bread. So, the right bacteria that develop there get into the body.

Many do not understand the benefits of such bread and have no idea how much such bread is being prepared. In the minds of people, a stereotype settled that bread is flour and water, kneading and baking. But this is not true, because bread is not only a product of baking, but also fermentation, where baking takes forty minutes. In “Anrov”, bread products are prepared for almost a day. It is important to understand that bread, like wine and cheese, it needs time to ripen in order to get a high-quality and genuine product. 

It is worth noting that the work of a baker in a sourdough bread is not easy. The baker must observe the process, control it. Attentiveness to the test is very important, because the dough is very lively. Therefore, the result that you get does not depend on the recipe, because there is no ideal recipe, but on the baker, who every day carefully looks at what is happening in the mixer and regulates this process.

 “The future of bread is in its past,” Antor Kornesov quotes the famous baker Karl de Smedt.

Marina Ogneva