Food that still tastes like food
Bröd is not health food. It is ordinary baking made with ingredients that have a reason to be there — and enough butter, sugar and time to taste properly good.
There is a version of modern baking where every ingredient has to prove that it is healthy.
Sugar becomes dates. Butter becomes something else. Flour gets replaced because flour has somehow become suspicious.
I have eaten plenty of that food.
Sometimes it is excellent. Sometimes it tastes mainly of the effort that went into avoiding the thing it was supposed to be.
That is not what I want Bröd to make.
A bun should still be a bun
A kanelbulle needs flour, butter, cinnamon and sugar.
Not a heroic amount of sugar. Not sugar because a recipe written thirty years ago says so. But enough.
The useful question is not: can this ingredient be removed?
It is: what is this ingredient doing?
Sugar brings sweetness, obviously, but it also changes colour, moisture and texture. Butter is flavour, but it changes the dough as well. Salt does far more than make bread salty.
Take something out and the food changes.
Sometimes that change is worth making. Sometimes it simply produces a worse bun with a better-sounding ingredient list.
I would rather make the first one properly.
Enough is enough
That does not mean more is better.
If something tastes right with less sugar, there is no prize for adding another hundred grams.
If seeds make a loaf better, they belong in it.
If dates work naturally in something like a chokladboll, good.
But ingredients should be there because the food needs them, not because they make a label look virtuous.
That is the distinction I care about.
Recipes are a starting point
I use formulas. Of course I do.
Baking needs consistency, and if food is being made for other people, ingredients and allergens cannot depend on somebody remembering what happened last Tuesday.
But a formula is not the same thing as switching your brain off.
Flour changes. Dough temperature changes. Fermentation moves faster one day than another. Fruit carries water. Melbourne can give you four seasons while a dough is proving.
You measure first.
Then you pay attention.
That is especially true with sourdough. Time and fermentation are ingredients in their own right, even if they never appear on a label.
Nothing to hide behind
I am wary of words like “clean”, “guilt-free” and even “natural” when they are used to make ordinary food sound medicinal.
Bröd makes bread, buns, biscuits and fika.
Some of it contains sugar.
Some of it contains butter.
Much of it contains wheat.
The aim is not to disguise that.
The aim is to make food where the ingredient list makes sense, the process has a reason behind it, and the result tastes good enough that nobody needs convincing it is good for them.
Flour. Butter. Cardamom. Sugar.
No apology required.