Welcome to the first of a three part series. We wanted to do a bit of a dive into gluten because it has turned into a major buzzword these past few years.
At Bread & Butter we’re asked on a near daily basis, “do you have anything that is gluten free?” Yet, the majority of people asking, don’t really seem to understand what gluten is, how it works, or if it’s harmful to our bodies. So, we wanted to shed some light on the subject. First things first, what is gluten?
PART 1: What is Gluten?
GLUTEN IS A PROTEIN
Gluten is a mesh of proteins primarily found in wheat (and some other species of grass). Gluten helps food maintain its shape, acting like a glue that holds food together.
In the bread making process of sourdough bread, gluten helps trap the gases (carbon dioxide and alcohol) created during fermentation. This allows the bread to rise and gives the bread its flavor. Without the extensible and elastic gluten to trap these gases the bread would never rise.
Essentially, all the best and most important aspects of bread come from gluten.
Check out this America’s Test Kitchen experiment where they washed away all the starch from a ball of dough until they only had gluten left, and blew it up, exactly like a little balloon.
