Proven Health Benefits of Eating Sourdough Bread

It is pretty easy to get caught up in the health benefits of sourdough when you see family members eating and enjoying bread again after years of skipping it. For our family, this all started with a bread class at Abagail’s Oven two years ago. There Martha Levie explained that some people who are gluten intolerant can eat their products without suffering intestinal distress.

While this is not true for everyone, it was for my sister-in-law who had given up bread because of her gluten sensitivity. I had her try some. She did well, so she began buying it at a store near their home. Partway through the year, I gave them a bag of Einkorn flour and a sourdough start. Since then they have made loaves that she can eat, but she prefers the convenience of just picking up a load at the Good Earth when she needs one.

Following that class and until now, I must have made a couple of hundred loaves of bread for family, friends, and neighbors. I have also made many dozens of biscuits, dinner rolls, and pancakes from sourdough and have virtually given up using baker’s yeast.

Before making my own bread regularly, I did not think much about what was in the commercial bread we had been eating. I just knew that the sourdough bread I was making tasted good—it was like bread I used to eat in Germany. But with so many folks around me suffering from blood sugar spikes, bloating, and gluten intolerance, I decided it was time to look into the science of natural dough fermentation which motivates my making even more sourdough bread.

In Foods,  Luana Nionelli and Carlo Giuseppe Rizzello wrote that “Sourdough fermentation positively influences all aspects of baked goods’ quality such as texture, aroma, nutritional properties, and shelf life.”¹

I looked into each of these and listed my findings at YourSourdoughStart.com.

References

^{1 Nionelli and Rizzello; Sourdough-Based Biotechnologies for the Production of Gluten-Free Foods; Foods, Sep 2016.} 

Tell us about your own findings in the comment section below.