Health
Habits
Food
Weight 
Better Than Butternut: Roasted Delicata Squash Recipe
10 Simple Ways To Eat Less Without Noticing
Juicing: Stupid and Pretentious or Nourishing and Enlightening?
10 Tasty Carbs That Won’t Make You Fat
How To Start Working Out When You Don’t Like To Exercise
Focus More on Your Brain and Less on Your Diet if You’re Serious About Losing Weight
Home Court Habits: The Secret to Effortless Weight Control
10 Reasons You Aren’t Losing Weight When You Think You’re Doing Everything Right
How To Burn More Calories Without Breaking A Sweat
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Foodists
Why processed foods are so bad, artisan vs grocery store bread, and finding time to cook healthy food – Episode 11 – Summer Tomato Live
This is one of my favorite discussions on health and processed food so far, thanks everyone for your questions. As always, show notes are below.
August 17, 2011 | Episode 11 of Summer Tomato Live will be here tonight at 6pm PST. The format is a little different this week. Instead of covering one topic, I’ll be answering 3 recent subscribers questions. The questions I’ll be answering are:
- What’s the deal with processed foods, why are they so bad?
- Are artisan breads as bad as grocery store breads?
- Cooking healthy food takes me forever. How can I make it quicker and less overwhelming?
Summer Tomato Live normally requires a subscriber password, but since we have so many new readers this week (thank you TIME Magazine!) I’m going to leave this episode open so anyone can participate.
Also to celebrate making TIME’s list of best websites, for the rest of the week I’m offering one free month off a new Tomato Slice subscription. So if you’ve been thinking about signing up, now would be a great time.
Read this for more information on the show and newsletter.
To watch live and join the discussion click the red “Join event” button, login with Twitter or your Vokle account, and enter the password when prompted. I encourage you to call in with video questions, particularly if your question is nuanced and may involve a back and forth discussion. Please use headphones to call in however, or the feedback from the show is unbearable.
See you soon!
Show notes:
- In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan
- How To Avoid Getting Sick In Flu Season
- How To Cook Perfect Rice Without A Rice Cooker (and make magical rice balls)
Have you ever made a bread made of more exotic flours?
I’d be interested in making one, since purchasing bread made of chia flour or sweet potato flour etc, is not likely to be found!!
Anonymoose, I bake my own bread; been doing it for about 8 months now. At first I found it overwhelming, but you learn the technique soon enough. I have a big Kitchen Aid mixer with a dough hook accessory so kneading is done in a jiffy. I’ve tried a few variations, including almond flour that I can make myself using a food processor. Currently my standard loaf consists mainly of white all-purpose flour, plus some spelt flour, some flax, some wheat germ, and a bit of chia. I like the taste and the satisfaction of knowing there are no mystery ingredients in it because it’s 100% homemade. I could never find that in a bakery. I eat, at most, maybe 1 slice per day, usually as toast with peanut butter that’s also homemade. I find the bread far from indispensable, but it’s nice to have on hand. It keeps well in the fridge.
At the outset I found my initial bread recipe in Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything and whatever I’ve done since then is really just variations on that. I have never strayed too far from that beaten path, because I have no idea how the dough would behave with the yeast if I changed the ingredients too radically. Even the kind of yeast you use, and how you handle it, and how you get the dough to rise, makes a big difference. Much of the baking technique is an art that you learn as you go along. I’m still learning.
A common technique is to mix “normal” bread flour with the other types (spelt, etc), however, I’ve had very limited success making breads purely with chia flour for example.
Zojirushi makes a bread maker (BB-HAC10) that does small single pound loafs (loaves?) at a time. I think this might be a good way to experiment until you master the technique.
@anonymoose, if you live in canada there are options..
http://www.silverhillsbakery.ca/Wheat-Free-Chia-Bread
http://www.celiac.com/glutenfreemall/udis-glutenfree-milletchia-ancient-grain-bread-p-2134.html
http://www.glutenfreepalace.com/Udi_s_Gluten_Free_Omega_Salba_Bread_p/u4019.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Zocalo-Sweet-Potato-Flour-Tienda/dp/B0032BYMJE
My family prefer to get bread from Trader Joe’s. We usually get the flaxseed, sprouted wheat and whole wheat/grain bread and they tend to have lower sugar content. We eat bread 2-3 times in a week. Will those bread from Trader Joe’s considered better than those from general grocery store? Are those from Trader Joe’s just as processed than the average bread found in general grocery store? If we have to find better bread to purchase, is there a guideline to refer to as a health-style upgrade. Thanks!
Make your decision based on the ingredients, the fewer and more normal sounding they are, the better.
Are you planning to post this as a podcast? I know I can listen to it here online, but I like to take your podcasts in the car on my commute.
Yes, I’ve been away for a week due to a family emergency and am behind on updating the podcast, but hopefully I’ll get to it this weekend. Sorry for the delay.
Sorry to hear that! No rush – I’m a couple of episodes behind anyway, and just thought I’d check.