This recipe is nutritionally complete with a subtle flavour of herbs. That means it can go well with anything, sweet or savoury, from marmite to peanut butter, and it works particularly well as a sandwich bread. Nutritionally complete diets don't need to be monotonous, nor do they need to be expensive. Live happily and healthily, cheaply and easily, with minimal impact on the environment.

Features

• Nutritionally complete
• As natural as possible
• Optionally nut-free*
• Easy to make
• Low cost
• Soy-free
• Vegan

*see the replacements section

Flavours

The current version of this recipe gets its vitamin K from dried sage. This means the taste is somewhat herby. If you want a more neutral taste, then 2.1 grams of dried spinach powder is a good choice, but this gives the bread an interesting tint of green. Otherwise, there are many other sources of vitamin K, but they generally aren't neutral in flavour, and so the reader may be interested in playing around with the balance of the following ingredients, to find a taste that suits them.

• Herbs: 4.3 grams of dried sage, thyme, or basil; or 5.5 grams of dried parsley or coriander leaf
• Leaves: 16 grams of spinach, 2.1 grams of dried spinach powder, 15 grams of nettles, 11 grams of kale, or 72 grams of lettuce (cos or romaine),

When adding the herbs, grind them and mix them in with the flour. When adding leaves, they can either be pureed and mixed in with the flour, or they can be added to a sandwich. Obviously, be careful with the nettles if you go down that route.

Experimental

Note that this recipe is currently in the early stages. If you manage to improve on it, please leave a comment saying how. Also note that the protein in the current version of this recipe has not been tested for completeness.

Equipment

• A mixing bowl
• Scales with at least 0.1 gram accuracy (USB rechargeable is also nice), or a measuring cups and spoons set
• Optionally, a grain mill; while you can buy the ingredients in a pre-powdered form, it is healthier to buy them whole and mill them yourself (see the question below about shelf life)
• Optionally, a sieve for separating the wheat flour from the bran
• An oven with a baking tray; or a hob with a pan, but how to cook these on the hob is left as an exercise for the reader (hint: like english muffins)

Instructions

• Optionally, sieve the whole-grain wheat flour to separate out the bran from the flour, the flour can then be used to make this bread, and the bran can then be added to something else, such as a soup, or a smoothie, resulting in a better bread
• Add the flax seeds to a cup with 60ml of the water and stir
• Mix the rest of the dry ingredients into a flour
• When the flax seeds have sat for five minutes or so, add them to the flour with the oil and the rest of the water
• Bring everything together, but avoid kneading the dough too much, as that will knock out the air that's produced by the baking powder when water is added
• If the dough is too dry and doesn't come together, then add a bit more water; if the dough is too wet and sticky, then add a bit more flour
• Divide the dough into 3 parts, roll each into a ball, place them onto the baking tray and flatten to about an inch thick
• Score crosses into the tops, about 5mm deep, and bake at 180 degrees Celsius for around 30 minutes

Replacements

• The carrot can be replaced with 6 grams of paprika
• The flax seeds can be replaced with 28 grams of chia seeds
• The wheat can be replaced with with 263 grams of barley, or 254 grams of oats, or some ratio thereof
• The almonds can be replaced by replacing at least 145 grams of the wheat with oats, and then by adding 30 grams of sunflower seed kernels (see the calories section)
• The ascorbic acid can be replaced with many alternative sources of vitamin C, including powdered acerola cherries and rose hips
• The kelp (also known as kombu) can be replaced with a gram of wakame, or by replacing the salt with iodised salt
• The nutritional yeast and the chlorella can be replaced with 20 grams of sundried shiitake mushrooms, and 2.4 grams of nori powder, though this does give a slightly mushroomy aftertaste

In case it wasn't clear in the above list, a gluten-free version of this recipe may be possible, which would involve replacing the wheat with 254 grams of oat flour. In this case, the ground almonds can be replaced with 30 grams of sunflower seed kernels, which are cheaper and less allergenic. If you try this, please leave a comment saying how it went.

Optional extras

• Marigold extract (0.1 grams at 20% Lutein & 2.5% Zeaxanthin)
• Broccoli sprout extract (0.2 grams at 0.3% Sulforaphane)
• Tomato extract (0.1 grams at 10% Lycopene)
• Turmeric extract (1 gram at 95% Curcumin)
• Black pepper (0.2 grams at 5% Piperine)
• Ginger extract (1 gram at 5% Gingerol)
• Garlic extract (1 gram at 3% Allicin)
• Inulin (8 to 12 grams)

Calories

You can increase the calories to 1800 by increasing the wheat to 361 grams and increasing the water to 230ml. It is best to do this if you replace the almonds with oats, as mentioned in the replacements section, as otherwise the bread gets a bit dense.

Vitamin D

The vitamin D in this recipe comes from the nutritional yeast. For nutritional yeast to contain vitamin D, it has to be exposed to ultra-violet light. Most manufacturers don't prepare their yeast in this way, and so nutritional yeast containing vitamin D is quite niche.

If you can't get the one linked to from South Garden, then alternative manufacturers include: VidiFood, which can be bought from the VidiFood website, or from Amazon; and Marigold, which is the most available but has the lowest vitamin D content, and can be bought from Amazon, Tesco, and many health food shops.

Otherwise, if you can't find any nutritional yeast prepared in this way, then you can replace it with standard nutritional yeast flakes and obtain vitamin D from another source, including:

• Sitting in the sun
• Taking a supplement
• Adding sundried mushrooms
• Starting down the long road of making your own nutritional yeast

Omega-3

Flax seeds are a good source of Omega-3 in its ALA form. ALA must be converted to EPA and DHA before it can be used by the body, but our bodies are generally inefficient at this. This recipe includes enough flax seeds to give a good amount of Omega-3, but as the conversion rate varies from person to person, it's not certain.

If you want to be certain then you can add a DHA powder, which can be found through eBay or similar, or otherwise take a DHA supplement.

Questions

What is the shelf life of this flour/bread?

Preferably you should make it on the same day that you will use it. Otherwise, keep it in the fridge and use it within a few days.

It may seem odd that it has such a limited shelf life, but it is really a myth of the modern world that you can have a (healthy) flour or bread that will happily sit on the shelf for months. The way that commercial manufacturers achieve this is by removing everything good from the grains and seeds, notably the fat and the bran. The end result is a sterile product that the mould avoids. Hint: if the mould wouldn't eat it, then neither should you.

Is there enough protein in this recipe?

Note, this answer was for a previous version; this version needs retesting for protein completeness

Yes there is a good amount of protein in this recipe, most of which comes from the oats. In this quantity, oats are a 'complete protein' and so they contain all of the essential amino acids in all of the recommended amounts.

That said though, the bodybuilding crowd would consider this to be on the low side, and so if you have high protein requirements then having these with a nut butter is a good way of achieving that.

Does the cooking process reduce the nutritional content?

Yes, some nutrients are unstable in heat and start to breakdown, but in this case the unstable nutrients have been included in larger amounts to compensate. WHFoods is a very good source for this as it includes a summary for each nutrient, including what percentage you can expect a nutrient to decrease by during cooking.

Isn't it better to just eat a varied diet?

If you're interested in nutrition, and dedicated to eating healthily, then for you, probably yes. But for most people, telling yourself that you'll be healthy by eating a 'varied diet' is usually to fall prey to a myth, the myth that being healthy is easy. Especially if you go vegan. A balanced diet can't just be stumbled on by eating 'five a day', or 'ten a day', or whatever else. If you don't give your diet full attention, then it will be lacking. And if you do give it full attention, then eventually you may find yourself putting together a list of ingredients with high nutrient densities, refining that list to filter out those that you think taste bad, filtering out those that are hard to find or are expensive. Then with that list of essentials, you may start to get the idea for combining them into a single form, for the sake of expedience and ease of remembering. First you may try to make it drinkable, but then you will find that drinking 250 grams of oats a day is difficult, at which point you will realise that bread is the staff of life.

Why not just take a multivitamin?

Despite the implicit promise of multivitamins, they lack many nutrients, including calcium, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, sulphur, etc. This is because these are needed in large amounts (multiple grams) and so if you decide to go down the route of getting your nutrition from pills, you will easily be taking upwards of 10 pills a day.

Besides that, this route makes the assumption that the field of nutrition science knows every nutrient that the body needs. This is not a safe bet, which is why it's better to get your nutrients from as many natural sources as possible, so that you get all of the unknown nutrients that they contain, as well as the known ones.

Can I copy or modify this recipe for use elsewhere?

Yes, this recipe is released into the public domain, so you can do with it whatever you want. That said though, as the recipe is continually evolving, it is better to link to it directly where possible.

Public domain

While the ability to copyright a recipe is questionable, for what it's worth this recipe and all accompanying text are placed into the public domain, under the Creative Commons Zero licence.

Nutrition sources

• WHFoods
• USDA FoodData Central
• Iodine content in seaweed
• Chromium content in wheat
• Molybdenum content in wheat