Flour to the people! The business and science behind one bakery’s breads

By Genevieve Vahl | [email protected]

One could call it listening to your gut. And that’s what Todd Bradley did when his gut was not happy, when it became upset after gluten and dairy entered his system. So Bradley gave up some of his favorite foods.

And one of those foods was bread. He really missed bread. Luckily, while working at Hell’s Backbone Grill in Boulder, Utah, his coworker enlightened him to the wonders of sourdough.

“And I was hooked,” he said.

He says 100% sourdough with a 20-hour ferment activates naturally occurring enzymes in the wheat that break it down, becoming digestible for the more sensitive or intolerant of stomachs.

“So when you give enzymes time to break things down, they break down proteins and they break down starches. When you add water to wheat and you give it time, it’s going to make it more digestible,” Bradley said.

Along his baker career path, Bradley took over Bread Riot Bakehouse in Salt Lake City, their tagline being “biohacking biology for deliciousness.”

Bradley rebranded Bread Riot to Leavity Bread & Coffee, a witty mashup of the bread word “leavened” with the light and humorous “levity.” The bakery and cafe sits in a strip mall on Main Street and 1000 South, making upward of 300 loaves a day, with 30 contracts mostly around Salt Lake City, including Caputo’s and the Rose Establishment, as well as selling at the farmers market year round every Saturday.

“It’s so easy to get people to come together over bread. Breaking bread with people lightens the mood, it speaks to everyone, bread is comforting,” Bradley said. 

As much as it's about the process of fermentation and food science, Bradley stresses the importance of how the wheat is grown and processed, which plays a big role in how it reacts in our bodies. 

“From the field, to the silo, to how it’s processed in this facility, countless things will affect the product,” Bradley said. “I think organic matters a lot of the time, but I think it’s mandatory for flour.” 

“Some of those reasons include protections for the soil, they have to have a crop rotation plan, they can’t just keep pumping the soil full of inorganic fertilizers…so it’s a huge part of sustainability,” he said.

Otherwise, conventional mono-commodity crops like wheat and oats go through a process called pre-crop desiccation, using glyphosate formerly known as Roundup, as a way to expedite the natural processes of a crop slowly dying and drying in the field.

Although the glyphosate pre-crop desiccation process offers farmers some economic benefits and securities, it leaves the crops in storage covered in glyphosate. Numerous lawsuits against the maker of Roundup, Monsanto (now owned by Bayer AG), contend that glyphosate causes cancer.

“For us, the flour in the bread has to be organic and then we focus more on whole grain. We use white flour as our base and then everything gets some combination of high extraction flours,” Bradley explained. “If you think of flour as a spectrum, there is type 50, type 70, up to 110.”

Focusing on the higher numbers, “we do this for flavor, for nutrition, so we can use more of the whole wheat.” Whereas white bread, for example, is stripped of all nutritional value down to a basic starch, instead of using flour’s rich depths of germ, proteins and oils.

Bradley prioritizes sourcing from local mills.

“Central Milling is a great company that’s based in Utah, they’ve been around for about 60 years. We also use a small mill called Hillside out of Idaho,” Bradley said. “We don’t need to be using flour coming from anywhere else in the world. There is a lot of great wheat grown here and a lot of great organic wheat.”

Leavity is also getting a small mill of their own. “I want to mill more whole grain, to do the things we love to do, to learn how to be bakers in different ways. Introducing new styles of bread that keeps us curious and like we’re growing.” He encourages bakers to test new recipes. “I want to continue to make our bread better and better,” he said.

Although not all of Leavity’s products are organic, like fruits and nuts, they are working on that transition while balancing costs and ethics and mainly focusing on local. The cafe serves Kings Peak Coffee. Ritual Chocolate is on the shelves. Beehive Cheese and Mountain Born Creamery butter from Ogden are in the fridge. Snuck Farms greens from Lehi are on sandwiches. The sodas are Taproot, another Utah company.

To Bradley, it is about building an understanding with his customers of where our food comes from and the built-in costs Big Agriculture intentionally keeps under wraps. While $11.50 may seem like a lot for a loaf of bread, he said that when factoring in all the costs, both human and environmental that are not taken advantage of along the way when sourcing ethically, it’s reasonable. Commodity agriculture has tainted our perceptions of how much food should cost, he says.

“Can we do some local, organically grown food subsidies so it’s more approachable and affordable for all?” Bradley asked. Instead, he said, of subsidizing corn and oil that are harming the environment and the health of our communities on the government’s dollar.

If his ethos wasn’t notable enough, cafes to Bradley offer the final cherry on top as places to gather and connect, where you see the same neighbors several days a week. “There is something so wholesome about that,” he said. Bradley wants to use the space to bring community centered, earth-first mentality into the business ecosystem.

"How can this be an act of doing things in a way that is good for the environment, for the people. How can we support things that people are doing with our space,” Bradley said. “If it helps people come together, we’ll send bread. That’s what our coffee shop is about.”

A guided cupping experience at Leavity (1000 S. Main St., Suite 101) with Ceremony Coffee Roasters will be held April 11; spots are limited. Sign up online here. On the last Wednesday of every month is Art Cafe, open late to create, 3-6 p.m., bring your own craft to co-work.