As most of you know if you have been reading my newsletter for any length of time, I am a big fan of the ketogenic diet lifestyle. I have been living the ketogenic lifestyle myself for the past fifteen years or so. Prior to that, I would go in and out of eating a ketogenic diet ever since I started my undergrad work at UC Davis. Wow, that is almost 50 years ago now! In the early days what would intermittently pull me out of the keto life would be my love of bread, especially sourdough bread. Hot sourdough bread with butter is like heaven. So I have definitely been missing bread for the last 15 years (that is when genetic testing showed me I was gluten sensitive.) I had a tough choice – eating bread or losing my brain. My gluten sensitivity was allowing the gluten to attack my memory centers back then. My short term memory was severely impaired to the point I could not remember what I had done the day before. Fortunately, my long-term memory still functioned so I could still be effective as a doctor. But at home, it was becoming laughable in a scary way.
Anyway, that pushed me into a full-time keto diet, as feeding the brain ketones from fat breakdown is the best way to help memory issues. Sourdough bread was now a pleasure of the past. I not only reacted to it, but grains are just like sugar and prevent your body from going into nutritional ketosis. I dealt with this loss of my love for bread by inventing a bread substitute based on how you make angel food cake. I called this my Miracle bread and sold it as a mix for many years in my office until the county health department upgraded the certification requirements for home-based food products. The cost of setting up a commercial kitchen was just too much.
My Miracle bread was great as a batter bread that we could add lots of different flavors to for variety. But it never came up to the bread consistency that made it work for sandwiches. It was too soft and crumbly. Recently I discovered several keto breads and roll recipes online using lots of psyllium seed husk powder that more closely resembled the traditional texture of real bread. These are good while they are hot and fresh, but they tend to collapse and get chewy and slimy once they get cold. This is not surprising once you realize that psyllium seed is the same thing as Metamucil stool softener. It is a great slimy drink for getting your insides moving.
Last week I was fooling around with a high-fat bread recipe. I had seen some good looking results for bread made with cheese, but cheese looks just like gluten to my body so that ingredient for bread was a ‘no go’ for me. But this new recipe was using whole eggs, butter, and almond flour as its base. My miracle bread used egg whites and no oil, just like the angel food I modeled it upon. Surprisingly this high-fat recipe came out quite well – still not like real bread, but good. I thought “what if I could combine the base recipe here with smaller amounts of psyllium seed powder as well as incorporating actual bread yeast?” Naturally, I had to test out this idea. The result was amazing! The new bread is light and fluffy, very flexible, great texture, slices easily, and most of all it tastes really good. It is a touch moister than most bread, more like a milk bread. I made four variations to see what happens when I use all butter, all coconut oil, a mixture of the two, and switching from almond flour to flax meal. You can see the results in the picture. The far left is the mixture, then coconut, butter, and flax on the right. Also amazing is that this is still a batter bread, so you make it much like a cake – mix it up, pour it into the bread pan, and bake. No proofing, punching, or rolling is required.
Since I am no longer making up the Miracle bread mix for the office, which had very expensive and hard to get ingredients, I thought I would share this recipe with you directly. There are only two unusual ingredients, and both are available either at the grocery store in the health section, at health food stores, or from Amazon. Those would be the psyllium seed husk powder and the xanthan gum.
The first step is to activate the yeast. I take 1/3 cup of water in a 1-2 cup container and heat it for 15 to 20 seconds in the microwave. The idea is to bring it up to about 120 degrees. I then add 1 tablespoon of organic sugar to the water and mix it well. I then add 1 package (or 1 Tbs) of baker’s yeast and mix well again. Set this aside while you start the rest of the process. By the time you add it to the bread mixture, it will have gotten all bubbly and doubled or tripled in size.
Next, take a cube of butter and gently melt it. To the melted butter add 2 tablespoons of coconut oil. Set aside. While you have the coconut oil out, grease the sides of your bread pan with it. Set the pan on a baking sheet.
Into a small bowl measure out 2 cups of finely ground almond flour, 2 tablespoons of psyllium seed husk powder, 1 teaspoon of baking powder, ½ teaspoon of both salt and xanthan gum. Mix these together.
Into your mixing bowl crack seven eggs. Whip on high for 2 minutes. Add the melted butter and coconut oil and the yeast mixture and mix into the fluffy eggs, then gradually add in the dry ingredient mixture with the mixer at a fairly high speed. Once everything is well blended pour the final batter into the bread pan.
Turn your oven on to 350 degrees. You are going to let the batter rest for 10 minutes to allow the yeast to grow more before you put it into the oven. By then the oven will be hot. After the ten minutes, put the loaf pan on the baking sheet and put it into the oven to bake for 1 hour.
When it is done it will have a firm crust that allows it to be turned out of the bread pan onto a cooling rack within only a minute or two. Once cool, slice and enjoy. Because of the high egg content, store this bread in the refrigerator.
Just for fun, I made one extra loaf last night as a sweet bread. I added a bit of stevia to the egg mix and made up some crumble topping from softened butter, cinnamon, Dr. Dave sugar, and almond flour. I actually poured the bread batter into the pan one third at a time and put a layer of crumbles between the layers as well as on the top. I ended up having to cook the loaf an extra ten minutes, but the final product is like a cross between cinnamon bread and a coffee cake. The bread is a very soft crumb finely textured bread, so it is not at all chewy like French bread. That allows it to work as a dessert bread.
Okay, for the copy and paste crowd, here are the ingredients:
1/3rd cup water – warmed
1 Tbs organic sugar
1 Tbs or 1 packet baker’s yeast
7 large eggs
½ cup butter – melted
2 Tbs coconut oil
2 cups finely ground almond flour
2 Tbs psyllium seed husk powder
1 tsp. Baking powder
½ tsp. Salt
½ tsp. Xanthan gum
It may seem like a small victory, but I am really looking forward to a ham and cheese (Daiya cheese) sandwich or a nice BLT with avocado (of course using avocado oil mayonnaise since vegetable oil mayo is toxic to the body.) Eating better calls me to get creative. I am not good at just accepting limitations. I like to find better alternatives.
Take care,
David