If you read our first “Whats Fresh in Pasadena” article a while back on Yemetz Family Farm & Orchards, you’d remember how my favorite snack after a long day of showing clients around looking at properties has got to be an almond butter and jelly sandwich. Not just any almond butter & jelly sandwich, but one held together by the most delicious, organic sourdough bread you can find in the area. The secret to these sandwiches? BEZIAN BAKERY
Jack (Owner), has been my go bread supplier for months now and I never buy bread anywhere else. Make sure you find him next weekend at the Pasadena Farmers Market @ Victory Park (Right next to Pasadena High school). Find out what makes his bread so special and more in the interview below:
365 Things To Do In Pasadena: Jack has been teaching me about bread for the last couple of years so tell us what makes your bread so special?
We usually go after flavor or what tastes good. You should not put things in your mouth unless you know what bad things are in them. Ingredients don’t make food. Fermentation, Probiotic, eating that food, that gives nutrition.
In other words their poop is your nutrition because you get vitamins, fatty acid, and minerals that you are not getting from ingredients. Then you stop having to worry about what is bad in your food. Probiotics, when they eat slowly, they devour not only the gluten, the lactin, the lifolin herbicide, pesticide, and most enrichments. They change the enrichments of other things [your starting ingredients] into other things so they don’t cause problems.
When I personally eat cookies, I like to get them from Mexican or Filipino Stores because they are not enriched. Enrichment is one of the worst things for you and [foods that are enriched] are considered to be lacking in vitamins.
365 Things To Do In Pasadena: I know there has been a lot of talk about gluten-free options and bread being high in carbs and starch-
Gluten has not been an issue until a few, 50-100 years ago. All of a sudden gluten has become a problem. Lectin is worse. Vegetarians that eat proteins that comes from grain, beans and nuts, those are the proteins that have lectin. So do nightshades and the seeds / shell of a tomato. When you put lectin in a pressure cooker, the protein can be broken up and don’t cause issues. Gluten cannot be broken up in a pressure cooker. Probiotics eat and devour and make nutrition into amino acids instead of proteins.
Proteins are a big problem. Poison is a protein. We don’t like to eat poison or get it in our blood. But when you ferment it, it can become nutritious. For instance, in Japan, pufferfish is poisonous, especially the liver and kidney. People die eating pufferfish but when you ferment it with rice bran, it becomes a delicacy. All your bad proteins can be broken up into amino acids so your body can absorb it, whether its animal or plant source.
365 Things To Do In Pasadena: Fermentation Obviously is important especially when it comes to sourdough bread. Do you ferment your bread longer than most?
Yes, most sourdoughs in the past were done with only probiotics. They didn’t know where the probiotics started from. They had to carry it all the way to Alaska and other places, thinking it was god-given. They carried it in wood or on their warm bodies while they travelled. Today, I myself know how to start it from scratch. A lot of people don’t know, they like to buy it from other people and make sure theirs is better than the other.
Of course, Probiotics come from different sources so they can make a different bread for you. The longer you ferment, the better the product will be. More broken up pieces and more nutrition for you. We age our products after mixing for up to a month and bake it. The ones that are aged a month will be very flat and dense and sour usually. But most people add yeast to sourdough, they call it “sourdough”, sometimes they only use yeast and brush it with vinegar and call it “sourdough” but it’s not.
365 Things To Do In Pasadena: So you ferment your bread for as long as a month?
We ferment for at least 12 hours, many times longer depending on the temperature. Then another half hour baking and then the aging, or how many days we age. Probiotics, some like warm temperatures and some like cold, depending on the variety you are talking about. So in a sourdough, you have multiple varieties of probiotics. They even ferment, meaning they eat (a lot of people don’t understand what fermenting means). They eat even in cold temperatures and even in hot. A longer fermentation brings out all these flavors.
Mixing is very important, if you don’t have a good mixer you wont have a good bread. What kind of a mixer you use, what kind of flour you use, what additions are added to the flour, what country it came from. It is not that important to see if it is an ancient grain or not because the sourdough mother should not be GMO. If the mother is GMO then no matter what you are doing, everything is going to be bad. So if you make a starter from corn or from soy, everything is gonne be from GMO. It is a lousy starter.
365 Things To Do In Pasadena: One final question, You mentioned all these different probiotics, should people eat different types of bread to get different types of probiotics?
It is not that important. The important thing is when you take a gram of flour, where the probiotics usually start from, you have about a few hundred – a few thousand probiotics per gram. When you have a starter made, you have billions per gram. So when a bread has been aged 1 day, or 30 days, the difference is you can eat 2 slices of bread instead of 3 slices of bread. The difference between a few billion to 30 billion probiotics is not that much in comparison to the difference between a few thousand probiotics you would find in your average bread.
If you are interested in selling your home, call Irina Netchaev at 626-627-7107 for a private consultation.
