On the agave…I use honey crystals and sucanant. I do have agave but use it very little.

When I see Brad Becker tomorrow, I’ll be sure to tell him the debate rages on. He’ll get a kick out of it, I’m sure.

Thanks for bringing this up, Laura.

I’m posting tomorrow on my conflicting research on olive oil in cooking/sauteeing and the best price I’ve found on coconut oil – I thought you might be interested!

Thanks for doing the research for us and hitting your head against the wall! ;)

My family owns a whole grain bakery in Georgia(www.thegranarybread.com) which is where the Beckers are, too. They have a huge following of housewives down here, and while I think the Beckers are a lovely family and right in many respects, they also are believed rather blindly somtimes. If we tell our customers anything contrary to what Sue Becker has said, we get the most insulted reactions.

At our shop, we do soak the wheat bread. In fact, when we started the store, we didn’t soak and found that it was impossible to get the bread to rise well. Now that we soak, the whole wheat bread rises beautifully, has a better texture, and tastes really good. I appreciate the health benefits, my mother appreciates the supperior quality of the bread, and our customers appreciate the wonderful taste. All of those are good reasons to soak bread.

About agave- I don’t a clue, and fortunately it doesn’t seem as important to me as the soaking debate.

Soaking- personally, I don’t notice a HUGE difference in the digestive system, except for the soaking of legumes. Our family just could not tolerate dried beans until I learned how to soak them in an acid solution for 24hrs. We did enjoy very good health in the years I judiciously soaked everything. I loved our soaked sourdough bread, but the girls did not. So I started making regular whole wheat yeast bread to get them to eat it. Still better than storebought you know? And we also just prefer soaked oatmeal- the texture is much creamier to us. Soaked pancakes and biscuits, eh, ok.

Mainly I think my husband benefited from all the soaking- his digestive system seems to be a bit more sensitive. We have gone WAY off course since I’ve been pregnant with the 4th and have lacked energy and time (we just moved) to really eat well. I look forward to all the soaking again soon.

Shucks! I always feel sad when I hear about how “expensive” coco palm sugar is.

How come not too many people complain about the price of Maple Sugar/Syrups when getting the Coco sap is many times as hard? Maple tappers need not climb trees that are 10-15M high, and they got tubings to make it all the easier to bring sap to the sugar house. A rational view is that with these equipment, expenses should have been minimized resulting to lower prices but the Maple industry managed to keep the prices up.

Anyways, my personal goal is to make coco sugar available to more people. It’s just that it’s so expensive for us small producers to ship them over to the States.

Here in the Philippines you can have a pound of coco palm sugar for about 4 USD (or 3 EUR). With a natural flavor that could give maple sugar a run for its money. ;)

As for the Agave, the only sweeteners I use are raw, local honey, pure maple syrup, sucanat, molasses and stevia. I like the stevia a lot because I’m hypoglycemic (low blood sugar), and the body processes it differently than sugar, so it doesn’t give me a crash, but it does give me the sweet. I feel like those are enough sweeteners to give me a variety, so I haven’t branched out into anything else.

That article was food for thought and I passed it on to some other people I know who regularly soak grains. It will be interesting to see what they say. I think though, that I will be sticking to my soaking. :-)

I also read Nourishing Traditions and personally it didn’t really jive me with. I kept looking at her sources, but it seemed that alot of the information she gave wasn’t sourced, so it felt like to me it was what she ‘felt’ or ‘thought’.

We eat all whole grains here and my kids and I don’t have any bowel issues, but I do buy my flour and oats from a local mill, so it is all freshly ground so maybe that makes a difference.

Thanks Laura for your research, I really appreciate it!
So thank you