"Real Bread
Of course the sourdough fermentation of flour from whole wheat and rye to make bread has strong traditions in several countries of the world, whether the breads are leavened, oven-baked loaves or flat leavened breads cooked over hot coals. This method is time-consuming and?even more problematic for the modern age?requires the careful maintenance of a culture medium, the sourdough starter, which is a stable relationship of a family of wild yeast fungi and several strains of local lactobacilli. Rather like the carefully nurtured cultures and caves that produce delectable fermented cheeses, sourdough bread cultures are a product of place and the people who care for them and use them. They are all different, produce flavors and rates of fermentation peculiar and beloved unto themselves, require temperatures and other conditions known intimately and respected by the baker. Commercial baker?s yeast, on the other hand, is a monoculture of just one single variety of yeast, grown to be a consistently fast and vigorous replicator and producer of carbon dioxide, but incapable of developing grain flavors (the lactobacilli are best at that). Sourdough cultures produce reliably leavened and complexly flavored breads via the alchemical communion of the culture microorganisms, flour, water, fire and time?plenty of time.
Michael Gaenzle, a cereal microbiologist now at the University of Alberta, Canada, has suggested that sourdough cultures are in fact so intimately connected with the people who use them that they form a mutually supportive and sustaining relationship.7 That is, the microorganisms are part of you (and come from you) and so the bread you ferment with them is tailormade to nourish and support especially you. You bolster your own health by eating bread cultured with your domestic friendly ?beasties.? This ?home advantage? is an obvious traditional benefit conferred on newly married daughters whose mothers included a barrel of sourdough in the wedding dowry to start their new households?to ensure their daughters? health and vigor (especially since they were soon likely to bear children) and provide them extra strength in their new positions in life.
The traditional sourdough process reliably neutralizes the anti-nutrients in the cereal grains as the flour is kept moist and acidic for many hours (or days). Ongoing research in cereal microbiology is investigating some preliminary evidence that the traditional sourdough method may also sever the bonds of the ?toxic? peptides in wheat gluten responsible for the celiac reaction and neutralize them as well.8 In short, certain lactobacilli in a sourdough culture acting on wheat flour for a 24-hour period achieved nearly complete digestion of the peptides. When bread made with these species was fed to recovered celiac patients for two days, the patients showed no signs of increased intestinal permeability that were found among recovered celiac patients who consumed the same amount of regular bread over the same time period. These intriguing results suggest that wheat (or rye) flour that has undergone 24 hours of culture fermentation may render the ?toxic? peptides harmless and allow the bread to be safely eaten by those with celiac disease, although studies of celiac patients consuming sourdough breads for a much longer period of time will be needed to confirm this.
In the study cited, test bread was made with fermented wheat flour and the remainder of the flour from the non-gluten grains millet, buckwheat and oats. The recipe does not resemble a classically prepared sourdough bread which is traditionally made in a building-up process of stages; some of the flour will have fermented for as long as two or three days, whereas some of it for only several hours prior to baking, during the period when the culture microorganisms experience exponential growth rate. The result of breaking down gluten completely is that it can no longer raise the dough!"
http://maninisglutenfreeblog.com/2011/07/05/the-history-of-how-wheat-became-toxic/