Eh. We start the bread Thursday night after dinner. We leave it alone until one of us gets home from work on Friday. It’s the best kind of cooking- the kind that you can go off and play a computer game during.
Drool, indeed. Soooo good.
I don’t think you understand the metaphor. Having oxygen and hydrogen next to each other is not the same as having water, even though oxygen and hydrogen are the constituent elements of water. Likewise, having fructose and glucose in a solution together isn’t the same as having sucrose, even though those monosaccarides are the constituent elements of said sucrose.
The post I was referring to said that HFCS was a disaccaride. The metaphor explains the difference.
fandango, yes, I understood what you were saying and the point you were replying to. I agree that HFCS is not a disaccharide, but your comparison to molecular hydrogen and oxygen is just way off.
If, when you drank water, the very first thing that happened was for the oxygen and hydrogen to separate out and form diatomic molecules, then that would be equivalent. In that case, you could consume separate hydrogen and oxygen and it would be roughly equivalent to drinking water.
With sugar, it really does very quickly separate into fructose and glucose, so there is little difference in consuming them as monosaccharides (separate molecules) or as a disaccharide (stuck together). I admit that it’s slower for sugar to be absorbed, because that weak bond has to be broken first, but my impression is that this is fairly quick.
Dude, you’re overthinking it. I didn’t want to bring in talk about glycosidic bonds, rather I wanted to illustrate in simple terms that just because HFCS is made up of glucose and fructose, it is not the same thing as sucrose.
Yes, I realised when I used my little metaphor that fructose isn’t* just like* hydrogen with one electron circling a nucleus or that glucose isn’t a necessary element to create fire like oxygen is–I guess I just took it for a given that people would realise that when I said “is like” I didn’t mean “is exactly the same as”.
Sucrose broken down into its constituent monosaccharides is known as invert sugar and has different properties (it is sweeter and a bit more syrupy)
fandango: my mistake.
Agreed.
The HFCS in soda and other sweet drinks is 55% fructose. The type of HFCS used in most foods and baked goods is 58% fructose IIRC. It’s all bad, but that extra fructose is going to add up if you eat a crapload of sweetened processed foods daily like most people I know.
Yes, but the amount of fructose in whole fruit is small compared to that of juice or sweeteners. Plus the fiber in fruit slows the absorption of the sugars.
The fructose adds up? So does glucose. It’s just calories. There is nothing special about it.
Even with kneaded bread recipes with 2-hour rises you don’t need sugar. There’s plenty of food for the yeasties in the flour itself that they don’t need any help. I have never added sugar to a normal white bread recipe, whether using commercial yeast or my sourdough starter. There has never been a problem with rising.
Another thing that doesn’t get mentioned is that acids catalyze the break down of that link. So I’d expect a cola sweetened with sucrose would actually contain very little sucrose since the acid in the tonic would have broken it down before you even drank it.
Don’t be silly. Nothing digested in the body is ‘just calories’.
Fructose must be stored and processed in your liver in the same manner as alcohol. It passes through your small intestine nearly unchanged and goes straight through the portal vein straight to the liver. Your liver converts most the fructose it processes into fat; so lots of fructose contributes to (non-alcoholic) fatty liver disease and high triglycerides.
I’d be curious to see a whole-life-cycle analysis of US-produced HFCS versus US-produced beet sugar or non-US-produced cane sugar. I’ve seen it asserted that growing corn for ethanol (for use in cars) in the US actually uses similar or greater amounts of fossil fuel and/or produces more greenhouse gases than just using plain gas in your car directly, since US farming methods are fossil-fuel intensive. I’d love to see shipping considered as well as fertilizer and pesticide (production and pollution), tractors and other farm equipment, and fuzzy stuff like who grows the stuff – big corporate farms, family-owned farms in cooperatives, etc.
I’m sure that lots of fructose leads to liver problems, I don’t have any reason to believe that lots is 5 - 10% more than normal. Anybody that consumes lots of sucrose based drinks is going to have the same problems as those that drink HFCS based drinks. Nations other than the US have an obesity problem as well.
Somewhat debatable is the satiety rating of HFCS as opposed to sugar. I have seen studies that gave HFCS the very lowest rating, which means it takes more before you think you are full.
Recently, another doper had a study that showed it wasn’t so bad.
However, I think it does have a lower satiety rating, and I also point to the larger sizes today. When I was a kid 12oz was large, 18oz was huge.
Today 32oz is no big deal and I have seen 64oz.
Note that potatoes have a very high satiety rating, thus they really are good on a diet.
^It would be interesting to track these two trends together, the use of HFCS and bigger serving sizes. 7-11 stores introduced their 32-oz. Big Gulp in 1980. When did Coke et al start using HFCS?
- At least in large amounts, there was likely test markets before that.
I don’t understand the debate here over sugar in homemade bread.
All it does is change the time/texture profile of the bread. If you want a slightly quicker bloom and a little faster rise, you get a lighter crumb for the same amount of time with a teaspoon of sugar or honey or whatever. The yeast will digest a lot of the sugar anyway; the amount left does not make a noticeable flavor difference or a calorie difference over the natural variation in flour.
Sweet breads (not to be confused with sweetbreads) are different, as they are obviously sweetened. But for normal bread, white, wheat, or whatever, any sugar added is miniscule in comparison to the recipe and not worth worrying about.
And even in mass-produced breads, HFCS used as a browning agent won’t be HFCS for long; browning is a chemical reaction.
Right, it’s only a tiny amount to feed the yeast.
If the time did bother you, though: take that exact recipe, double the yeast, and replace the 20-hour setting period with a ten minute wait followed by another ten minutes in a stand mixer with the dough hook, on whatever the highest speed that won’t throw the mixer around is. Do everything else per recipe and it will be almost indistinguishable from the original (and still doesn’t need sugar).
When I was a kid, a “king size” soft drink bottle was 10 ounces.
As far back as I can remember, which would be early 70’s, soft drink machines sold 12 oz cans. There were also the bottle-dispensing vending machines, but I don’t remember if the glass bottles were 12 or 16 oz.
Ok, but I still don’t understand why such a miniscule amount of sugar (we’re talking a spoonfull for a 6 cup recipe) is an issue of concern. You can get the same result by using active dry yeast instead of quick-rise, or letting it rise in a warmer place, or any number of other ways.