The Bread Quest - Second Attempt

My lovely husband last week decided to try making bread again and this time he did a Ciabatta bread! He took the recipe from Epicurious but substituted part of the flour with whole wheat upon my request. Probably for this reason the bread didn't rise as much as it should have, but it was still pretty good! Kudos to my husband! Right away out of the oven it seemed a little to yeasty, but I have to say that when it cooled off it tasted just perfect. The crust wasn't as crunchy as you would find it in Italy, but it was still good enough. Our son loved it and I have to say that there is a certain satisfaction in seeing your son eating something you have made from scratch and you know exactly what ingredients you put in it. The only downside is that the whole process took 24 hours ( he left the first part of the dough rest overnight) and even though the result was so good, it is still very laborious to make more often than once a week, so I finally convinced him to get a bread machine. It is the Westbend 41300 Hi-Rise Electronic Dual-blade Breadmaker ( what a big name for an appliance) and we are looking forward to try it once we finally get it. I am hoping to make bread at least twice a week and to try some recipes without or with a lower amount of gluten.

As for buying bread, the supermarket does not carry any brand that is organic. Sara Lee apparently tried to cash in on the growing organic market by launching a brand called EarthGrains. This brand ( sold at my local supermarket ) advertised the use of at least 20% of Eco-grains. Apparently these grains are grown in Idaho through a technique called precision farming that should reduce the erosion of the soil and the use of pesticides and fertilizer. As much as good an attempt this is, it really looks like a way to look more green in order to sell to a different market of people, and it seems like Sara Lee already got in trouble with an organic growers' association for claiming on its website that Eco-grains are better than organic. According to an article I found on the Star-Telegraph Sara Lee was forced to remove the comparisons with organic from their website, in which they claimed that organic crops still impoverish the soil and destroy undeveloped land.On the other hand other experts say that these claims would be true if the Eco-grain were cultivated with a no-till technology, which eliminates the erosion problem, but they aren't.  The  organic association, called Cornucopia, posted on their website a fact sheet comparing Eco-grain with organic grains, but they do not mention the tilling problem at all. To me that of Sara Lee looks just like another marketing strategy, and I will be happy to make my own bread instead. For now we already have so much flour in the house that we have decided not to buy anymore until we finished what we have. Then the quest for the perfect sustainable flour will start, and who knows where that will take us.