Baking for a Healthy New Year

12-22-11

THE WHOLE STORY ON WHOLE GRAINS

This year, there are a whole lot of reasons to look to whole grains. A diet packed with whole grains can improve the health of your customers in a myriad of ways – it has been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease, type-2 diabetes, obesity, as well as some forms of cancer. Whole-grain diets can also be important for improving bowel health, and the promotion of healthy bacteria in the colon.

There’s more good news for whole grains – they are packed with nutrients including protein, fiber, B vitamins, antioxidants, and trace minerals (iron, zinc, copper, and magnesium).

If that weren’t enough to start baking and promoting whole grains, your customers can get even more benefits, as indicated by recent studies:

• reduced risk of asthma
• healthier carotid arteries
• reduction of inflammatory disease risk
• lower risk of colorectal cancer
• healthier blood pressure levels
• less gum disease and tooth loss

How can you bake with whole grains? More ways than you might think. The obvious choices are whole-grain breads, bagels, and crackers. But whole grains are also great choices for pitas, wraps, flatbreads and tortillas, providing healthy and hearty sandwich alternatives for your health-conscious customers.

While whole grains may sound hearty, there are some great ways to add whole grains to your line up of sweets as well. You can add whole grains to your cakes, pastries and pies by blending half whole-meal flour with all-purpose flour to boost the whole-grain content without sacrificing flavor, texture or volume. Another baking option to boost whole grains is to replace one-third of the flour with whole-grain oats.

And whole grains are great choices for kid-friendly healthy choices, including buns, sandwich bread and whole-wheat pizza crusts.

AB Mauri^® has a complete line of innovative ingredients to complement your whole grain baking adventure. Contact your local distributor for all of your yeast and bakery ingredient needs.

GLUTEN-FREE AND GREAT-TASTING

Where there’s wheat flour, there’s gluten -- the sticky, stretchy, strong protein that forms when flour and water mix. It’s found in wheat (including kamut and spelt), barley, rye, malts and triticale. Gluten contributes to the elasticity of dough, gives structure to baked goods and helps wheat flour change texture, so you can create a variety of baked goodies – including muffins, bagels, pastries, and chewy artisan bread. And the right amount of gluten is critical to getting the texture you want in your baked goods.

But many people – as many one in 133 Americans – require a gluten-free diet – the only treatment for a number of diseases, including celiac disease, the related condition dermatitis herpetiformis, and wheat allergy.

So how do you bake both gluten-free and delicious?

You can make gluten-free bread from a variety ground flours, including rice, sorghum, corn, or legumes (beans). But since these flours are gluten-free, it is hard for them to hold their shape as they rise, so they need additives such as xanthum gum, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose (HPMC), corn starch, or eggs in place of gluten for shape and elasticity.

Once you say goodbye to wheat flour, it is time to get creative! Gluten-free bakers have lots of other choices, including gram flour (chickpeas), tapioca starch, soya flour, buckwheat flour, teff flour, potato flour, sweet potato flour, amaranth, and quinoa.

But ingredients are just the beginning. Going gluten-free means that your entire facility has to be free from gluten – from beginning to end. Don’t forget:

• Processing
• Packaging
• Storage
• Labeling

Say goodbye to gluten, and hello to variety!

AB Mauri^® has a complete line of innovative ingredients and real-time process solutions to help you go gluten-free. Contact your local distributor to learn more.

LOW-SODIUM BAKING – HEART HEALTHY

It sounds like a simple ingredient, but low-sodium baking powder can change a life. For Donald Gazzaniga, diagnosed with congestive heart failure and headed for a heart transplant, the switch to low-sodium baking powder and other low-sodium foods turned his health around and removed him from the transplant list.

While heart disease is the best-known reason for adopting a low-sodium diet, low-sodium foods are gaining popularity with good reason – living a low-sodium lifestyle can either reverse chronic disease or ease debilitating symptoms for myriad of conditions, including hypertension, Meniere's syndrome, Nephrotic disease, CHF, stomach cancer and more.

Moving to a low-sodium diet has significant effects on the body – an enlarged heart can reshape to normal size, and blood pressure can drop significantly. The move to a low-sodium diet—combined with exercise and prescribed medications – can simply be life-changing.

Baker’s Best Low-Sodium Baking Powder can be an important part of your ingredient portfolio. Many customers are taking stock of their health at the start of the New Year – a great time to introduce a variety of great-tasting low-sodium options – including cakes, cookies, crackers and biscuits.

Baker’s Best Low-Sodium Baking Powder yields excellent grain, texture, volume and crumb crust color, and – best of all—contains nearly 50% less sodium than similar baking powders – which makes all the difference when it comes to health.

Contact your AB Mauri^® local distributor to learn more about low-sodium baking.