Bakery Run - La Madeleine
Jan. 9th, 2011 03:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebAt La Madeleine, I decided to get a loaf of their bread. My favorite thing to eat there is the tomato basil soup with their bread dipped in it. My favorite bread is seven-grain bread, so I chose that flavor. It was less than $4, just like some of the breads I've been getting at the store lately. Score!
The bread came with an ingredients list attached. Sadly, the first ingredient (after water) is regular flour. The next ingredient is "grain base" which has a whole bunch of other flours and seeds. So there's more white flour than all the other flours combined. That surprised me.
Well, many people think you need to cut your whole grain flour 50/50 with white flour when cooking, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. But how close was it to 50/50? I checked the fiber content. A two-ounce (57-gram) serving has 2g of fiber. That's the same amount as a 31-gram serving of the HEB Bake Shop 100% whole wheat bread I settled for last week. It's also the same amount as a 1-ounce (28-gram) serving of Pepperidge Farm whole wheat cinnamon raisin bread. So, half as much as mediocre store-bought whole wheat breads. Sad.
However, the sugar looked good. Most people think you need some kind of sugar in yeast breads for the yeast to have something to eat (though I've seen one recipe claiming that the starch from the flour was enough). There's no high-fructose corn syrup or anything like that in the bread I got. The only sugars I can see are dried molasses, malt and grape juice. And only 1 gram of sugar per serving (compared to 3 g for half as much HEB bread and 4 g for half as much raisin bread). Cool.
So, I made a slice of toast and buttered it. This should be a real treat--normally I eat it cold and either dipped in tomato soup or spread with strawberry jam, both of which are really good but not my favorites at home. It has a nice sour dough taste. But also tasted quite salty. I blamed my taste buds the first day.
The second day it still tasted salty, but I couldn't find salt in the ingredients list. Robin found that the sodium content was 340 mg, a crazy high number. (Half as much HEB bread has 170 mg and half as much raisin bread has 105 mg.) I looked more closely, and there it was as part of the "grain base," right after the millet and before the dried molasses.
Overall, the ingredients are still of higher quality than the (cheaper) store-bought breads I have at home right now--and most store-bought breads--but I was hoping for better proportions.
Next time I go, I'll check out their whole wheat bread and see if that looks any better. A lot of times whole wheat breads do look nutritionally better to me.
The bread came with an ingredients list attached. Sadly, the first ingredient (after water) is regular flour. The next ingredient is "grain base" which has a whole bunch of other flours and seeds. So there's more white flour than all the other flours combined. That surprised me.
Well, many people think you need to cut your whole grain flour 50/50 with white flour when cooking, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. But how close was it to 50/50? I checked the fiber content. A two-ounce (57-gram) serving has 2g of fiber. That's the same amount as a 31-gram serving of the HEB Bake Shop 100% whole wheat bread I settled for last week. It's also the same amount as a 1-ounce (28-gram) serving of Pepperidge Farm whole wheat cinnamon raisin bread. So, half as much as mediocre store-bought whole wheat breads. Sad.
However, the sugar looked good. Most people think you need some kind of sugar in yeast breads for the yeast to have something to eat (though I've seen one recipe claiming that the starch from the flour was enough). There's no high-fructose corn syrup or anything like that in the bread I got. The only sugars I can see are dried molasses, malt and grape juice. And only 1 gram of sugar per serving (compared to 3 g for half as much HEB bread and 4 g for half as much raisin bread). Cool.
So, I made a slice of toast and buttered it. This should be a real treat--normally I eat it cold and either dipped in tomato soup or spread with strawberry jam, both of which are really good but not my favorites at home. It has a nice sour dough taste. But also tasted quite salty. I blamed my taste buds the first day.
The second day it still tasted salty, but I couldn't find salt in the ingredients list. Robin found that the sodium content was 340 mg, a crazy high number. (Half as much HEB bread has 170 mg and half as much raisin bread has 105 mg.) I looked more closely, and there it was as part of the "grain base," right after the millet and before the dried molasses.
Overall, the ingredients are still of higher quality than the (cheaper) store-bought breads I have at home right now--and most store-bought breads--but I was hoping for better proportions.
Next time I go, I'll check out their whole wheat bread and see if that looks any better. A lot of times whole wheat breads do look nutritionally better to me.