Dazed and confused? Not me. I’m just Lost in the Cheese Aisle.

Monday, October 16, 2017

ON THE VIRTUES OF BIBLICAL BREAD

“Take also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and spelt, and put them in one vessel and make bread of it." - Ezekiel 4:9



Apparently, a lot of folks look at the Scriptures as more than nourishment for the soul: they’re a cookbook as well. At least, that seems to be the thinking behind Ezekiel Bread, which is made from a variety of sprouted grains that includes the above-mentioned wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt.

Sprouted grain bread is actually pretty nutritious, even though it contains millet, with which I first became familiar when we fed our parakeet. A sprouted grain contains less of the carbohydrate-rich endosperm than does its unsprouted comrades, while providing a higher proportion of protein. Good, and good for you!

I’ve eaten Ezekiel bread and breakfast cereal, and it’s reasonably tasty. The cereal bears a superficial resemblance to Grape-Nuts, with only minor differences in texture and flavor. Fortunately, it does not give me the kind of hallucinatory visions that are familiar to anyone who has spent a lot of time reading the Book of Ezekiel.

Basing your recipes on the Bible is tricky business, though. Just look at us Red Sea Pedestrians: we follow in the steps of our ancestors who were in so big a hurry to get out of Dodge that their dough had no time to rise. Thus, we eat the famously constipating unleavened bread known as matzoh.

And if you put the proper context around Ezekiel’s recipe, you find that it was intended as a punishment: a bread to be baked over burning human excrement.  This gives a whole new meaning to the time-worn expression “holy shit.” Perhaps it explains those hallucinatory visions, too.

Hey, we now know that Flavortown has been around for a loooong time. Take that, Guy Fieri!

1 comment:

Harry Hamid said...

That's a shame. Just think of the new audience you'd haul in if you ended up with ergot poisoning and started hallucinating.

The heating method gives one pause, of course, but I suppose it's no worse than where other potential hallucinators find their mushrooms...