Practical Methods in Preparing Health Building Foods

Bread

The only wholesome bread is that made from wheat that has been ground into flour by a stone-type mill within a few hours of its conversion to bread.

You must get such a flour from a supplier who grinds wheat daily, or get a small mill and grind your own. The wheat should be high protein, grown without irrigation on soil that has not been depleted, preferably organically fertilized. Such a wheat will cost you twice as much as a lower quality, but it is the cheapest from a nutritional viewpoint. The fine flavor will prove its worth, alone.

In baking whole wheat bread, it is important to use as much fluid (water or milk) in the dough as possible. The finer the wheat is ground, the more fluid is necessary, the softer the dough should be to get the lightest loaf. Too much yeast, too rapid rising will make a less flavorful bread; the yeast enzymes must have time to work. Bread can be made without yeast, if you allow 24 hours for rising.

Butter should not be used in bread making as a shortening. It inhibits the yeast to a variable extent, so you never can predict what will happen. Peanut oil, corn oil, olive oil is preferable.

Meats

Meats, fish or fowl must be fresh or deep-freeze to be intact, to contain their normal vitamin and mineral content.

The preservatives and color-retaining chemicals used in most cold meats, sausage, corned beef, etc., are poisons, must of necessity undermine our health. Nitrites, nitrates, benzoates, and other chemicals are used. These foods are all out-of-bounds to the seeker of health-building nutrition.

Even fowl today may be contaminated by stilbestrol, a synthetic chemical used to increase gain rate and reduce fattening time in commercial production. Canada, after a careful investigation, has outlawed the use of stilbestrol. It has a castrating effect on the male, sex-stimulating effect on the female. Our country is still in the dark ages in this respect. You must be your own health food inspector.

Sea foods are probably tops in health building rating, if fresh. They are not subject to the effect of depleted soils, poor feed, or DDT contamination.

Vegetables

Here again we must use great discrimination. Unless we have our own organic garden, we must guard against arsenic poisoning (from soil contamination; in the main, Southern California soils are loaded from previous bug-spraying activities), DDT poisoning, weed poisons, and the ever-present loss of nutrients by reason of soil depletion.

Once we find good vegetables, the best way to get the food value out is to extract the juice, and avoid cooking.

The best juice extractor is a juice press. This requires previous grating or shredding to as fine a state as possible. The hydraulic press is fine for commercial production, but too cumbersome for the kitchen. Two new small screw presses are now available, both designed by doctors who had to solve the problem for their patients. They do the job as well as a hydraulic press, with a minimum of expense and bother.

The best juice of all, nutritionally, is potato juice. We look upon the potato as a starch food, failing to realize that it has the most nutritious protein of any vegetable. This protein is almost all in the juice, and the starch all remains behind in the pulp, so there is no carbohydrate in potato juice. It is very high in vitamin C complex, a better vitamin C pattern than is found in citrus fruit, as it contains a lot of tyrosinase fraction, the organic copper blood-builder.

To make potato juice, peel and cut up the potato, squeeze over the pieces some lemon juice to stop darkening from oxidation, run through the grater and immediately squeeze out the juice. It must be made just before it is to be consumed; it darkens by oxidation rapidly if stored. That is true of any fresh juice, in fact; the flavor suffers by any storage.

Liquefiers and blenders are guilty of causing rapid oxidation, by mixing air into the material. If care is taken to expedite the process, a blender can be used to grind the vegetable pulp before pressing out the juice. The vegetable must be diced, a little water added to start the action, and as soon as a well comminuted cream is produced, pour it into the muslin bag of the juice press and extract the juice.

The addition of lemon juice or ascorbic acid is a great help in preventing oxidative changes, or darkening of juice. Ascorbic acid is a synthetic product; we suggest its use not as a vitamin but as a vitamin preservative. It is one of the few synthetic vitamin imitations that is not toxic, or dangerous to use in greater amounts than the “daily requirement.” It is widely used today in canned fruits to prevent darkening.

Coconut diced and creamed, then extracted in the juice press affords a delectable coconut milk that makes the finest home-made ice cream if used in any ice cream recipe. To facilitate the extraction of coconut meat from the shell, put the whole coconut into a hot oven for a few minutes (until you hear it crack) and you will find the meat loosened from the shell. The brown skin on the white meat need not be removed for milk making. It remains in the dry cake, after the liquefying and squeezing process.

To make soy bean milk, soak soy beans in several changes of water in the refrigerator (to prevent souring during this operation). This is to extract a water-soluble enzyme that blocks the digestion of the soy bean protein, or any other protein eaten with it. (Bread made with untreated soy flour is often found “heavy on the stomach,” and quite indigestible for some people.) Liquefy the soaked beans in a blender, and pour the cream into the bag of the juice press and extract the milk. This soy milk can be used for any purpose like ordinary milk, can be made in any degree of concentration.

The liquefied beans direct from the blender can be used in bread making, as 10% of the flour (in dry soy bean weight).

The Chinese never eat soy bean products without this soaking process. It is the secret of successful soy cookery.

Fruit Juices

We must recognize apple and grape as the most healthful of the fruit juices.

The citrus fruits, grapefruit in particular, are in the main to be used with great discretion unless you have access to organically grown or Florida Indian River fruit.

The Indian River fruit commands the highest price in the New York market, about twice the usual figure, because of the unusual flavor. The reason is that the Indian River district is underlaid by porous coral that lets in the sea water; no well over 30 feet deep has fresh water. The trees, therefore, absorb the sea minerals, so no mineral deficiency exists.

Ordinary grapefruit is excessively alkaline. It aggravates arthritic and neuritic pains, promotes any pathological calcium deposits, kidney stones, bursitis, etc.

We must get our acid ash foods and our alkaline ash foods in relatively equal amounts, and if we get off balance we must choose some from the right list to regain that balance.

Cereals, grains are all acid…Root and leaf vegetables are all alkaline…

Meats and fish are acid…Fruits may be either–apple and grape are almost neutral.