Good keto bread and keto friendly bread is what many low carb dieters long for. I have tried different recipes and looked at commercial “keto friendly” loaves of bread available at grocery stores and have yet to find anything that is both good and low carb.
What makes good bread? Gluten. And where does gluten come from? Wheat. All traditional bread is made with flour. White, wheat, rye, pumpernickel, or whatever. Combined with yeast the gluten in wheat holds the interior of bread together to create those lovely large holes in a baguette. It’s also what makes those tight tiny holes in soft and spongey Japanese milk bread. It’s the magic secret sauce that produces all that bread goodness. Almond flour, coconut flour, or any low carb alternative can’t hold a candle to wheat flour. Can you believe that people are so desperate that they are even willing to try flours made from crickets?
Low carb bread recipes try to mimic gluten by using mozzarella cheese, psyllium husk powder, or xanthan gum as binders to hold low carb flours together. What you end up with is something that might look a little like bread but has the texture of something mealy and grainy. All the times I’ve tried making those recipes I’m always left disappointed.
The low carb and keto friendly bread in the stores are not truly low carb either. Each one has somewhere between 12 to 15 grams of carbs in each slice. Some make the claim that they are 1 gram of net carbs because they subtract the fiber content from the total count. To me net carbs is a bit of a cheat. To compare low carb to standard bread, my favorite wheat bread that I used to eat is 21 Whole Grain Dave’s Killer Bread. Each slice has 22 grams of carbs or 17 grams of net carbs. Meanwhile, a slice of Wonder Bread has only about 15 grams of carbs or 14 grams net carbs. Total carbs between low carb and standard bread is not much different. But, if you are addicted to bread and need the fix using the low carb breads are better than nothing. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to make it a regular habit. You’ll only end up eating lots of it.
So, what can a person trying to stay low carb but wants bread? If you’re not epileptic and you’re going low carb purely for weight loss I think you can eat keto friendly and still have bread. You just can’t eat it every day. If you’re able, limit yourself to having those carbs you crave to once a month or less. Learn to make your own because then you control the ingredients. Look at labels and watch out for added sugars. Most commercial breads have sugar in some form. But, if you know you cannot limit yourself once you start then skip it and use the low carb alternatives to wean yourself off completely.
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