As BIANKA was tied to the dock so I could fill the waters tanks a fellow sailor whose boat is on a nearby mooring came by in his dingy. He just returned from a week long cruise and offered some of his left over provisions. Including a loaf of Wonder Bread. I do have a Zojirushi Mini Breadmaker
bread maker on board. But, I had not not yet made any. So I took the bread and some of the other items offered. I used some of his donated bread for French Toast, Egg Sandwiches and such on the cruise. When I make bread on board using the bread maker it usually lasts a few days before it starts to go stale. But, here it is a week and half after I received the donated bread and it is still not stale or moldy. Amazing! Though like it's name says I do have to wonder how it remains fresh after almost two weeks. There certainly is a difference in the amount of time between my homemade bread and the store bought Wonder Bread lasts.
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6 comments:
Since there is no nutrition in that
kind of bread, no self respecting
mold spore would live on it.
http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/
I would not trust any food that has this long of a shelf life. I did a quick google search, the ingredient list looks too difficult to pronounce..second red flag for me. I suppose one has to resort to such provisions when going offshore for a while but being close to shore I would not if I can buy bread that will naturally go stale in couple of days.
From personal experience, some years ago we went camping and accidentally left half of the Entenman's pound cake overnight. In the morning it was filled with ants and I thew it in the fire. The "cake" lit up with blue flame and started shrinking like some plastic. We never bought it again :)
The French name for pound cake is "quatre quarts" or four quarters.
This is the basic recipe for pound cake:
4 equal amounts of flour, sugar, butter and eggs, usually 1 cup to 4 eggs.
Flour and sugar are all carbohydrate -- readily absorbed by the body for energy now.
butter is fat -- stored energy.
The egg provides the binder and protein.
Pound cake is full of energy. Ants love sugar so no surprise that they feasted on the manna from heaven. In the fire, that energy was reacted with oxygen and released as heat. And there is a lot of energy in a pound cake. It was the sugar making those beautiful blue flames. It was just an indication of how much energy was being released, not an indictment of the chemicallyness of the pound cake. A standard home-made pound cake would have reacted similarly in the fire.
Try putting 1 tbsp of flour in your mouth and then blowing it into a camp fire. It makes quite the display. This is also why smoking is just as dangerous at a flour mill as it is in a gas station or oil refinery. Airborne fine particles of flour will burn and react similarly to a gasoline vapor explosion.
Sugar burns quite readily -- don't leave a marshmallow in the fire for too long.
Butter can be burned like any other fat or oil -- think grease fires.
The only thing in a pound cake which doesn't readily burn is the egg.
Store bought pound cakes are also normally soaked in some sort of syrup solution for flavor and moisture. My personal favored syrup is a mixture of 1 part rum, and 0 parts anything else. But none of this helps reduce the flammability of a pound cake but it will contribute to the blueness of the flame ;-)
All this said, Wonderbread has it s place, but not in my never-far-from-shore galley. Especially not if there is a fresh option. And a breadmaker on board on requires a few minutes every few days in cleaning and prepping. The machine does the rest while you sleep.
Happy sailing,
/Jason
Yeah Bill not a single mold spore on that bread in over two weeks!
Val:
I was not about to look at the "gift" bread's ingredients label. I thought it might just do for a few days before I made some homemade bread in the bread maker. But, the stuff never went bad. I did not even refrigerate it or wrap it up tightly.
Jason:
Yeah I certainly would not have bought the bread had it not been given to me as I was about to head out on the cruise. Amazed at how fresh it stayed for over two weeks. Did not even harden or get crusty. Got to hand it to the food technologists who formulate it. But, yeah I'll stick with my homemade bread in the future.
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