Bread Research

[nao57]

The following below is cut and pasted from other research I did on breads. Its very easily verifiable. It represents a position where someone reading it would think... I should boost my gardening skills and production because I know that MY OWN grown food is healthy and what's in it.

...

what patents exist in the US for bread that is over 40% cellulose?

Because substituting that much wheat flour destroys the structural gluten network, these patents aren't just for a basic recipe—they are heavily focused on engineering the dough with chemical binders (hydrophilic gums, emulsifiers, and vital wheat gluten) to keep the extreme amount of cellulose from turning the bread into a pile of sawdust.

Historical and active U.S. patents that explicitly target or cross the threshold of 40% to 100% cellulose replacement for flour or starch include:

1. The Core High-Cellulose Bread Patents
* U.S. Patent 4,109,018 – "Low Calorie Diet Bread"
The Threshold: Reaches up to and over 40% alpha-cellulose replacement.

The Formulation: This is one of the classic foundation patents for high-cellulose bread. The inventor used a mixture of vital wheat gluten, protein concentrates, alpha-cellulose, and a precise amount of hydrophilic gum. The gum binds to the massive water intake required by the cellulose, locking in a formula that is 76% water by weight to yield a passable slice of sandwich bread.

* U.S. Patent 3,574,634 – "Low Calorie Foodstuffs" (Singer)
The Threshold: Replaces flour up to 85% to 90% with non-nutritive edible fillers like cellulose.

The Formulation: This patent addresses a total overhaul of dough dynamics. It covers synthetic dough matrices that drop assimilable carbohydrates below 10% to 15% by weight. To achieve this, it binds alpha-cellulose or purified wood pulp using vegetable gums and isolated wheat gluten to maintain gas retention so the "bread" can actually rise.

* U.S. Patent 3,676,150 – "Low Calorie Yeast Leavened Baked Products" (Glicksman et al.)
The Threshold: Targets a strict 50% or higher calorie reduction using cellulose flour.

The Formulation: Filed by prominent food scientists, this method specifically outlines how to use high ratios of microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) alongside high-viscosity cellulose gums to yield yeast-leavened breads that match the soft, elastic texture of standard white bread.

2. Advanced and High-Ratio Flour Replacements
* WO1999022605A9 / U.S. Priority – "Physically coated cellulose as low calorie flour replacements" (Nabisco, Inc.)
The Threshold: Up to 50% to 100% replacement of traditional flour.

The Formulation: Filed by Nabisco, this patent targeted the physical limitations of high-cellulose baking. Because raw cellulose makes bread crumbly, dry, and unpalatable, Nabisco invented a process where particulate cellulose (microcrystalline or α-cellulose) is physically coated with an edible hydrophobic polymer (fats or oils) via a intense hot-melt mixing process before being put into dough. This stops the cellulose from absorbing too much water from the remaining flour matrix.

* EP0086527A2 – "Low calorie baked products" (U.S. Patent 3,145,108 Cross-Reference)
The Threshold: Dictates a specific 4:1 ratio (80%) of microcrystalline cellulose to wheat flour for specialized bread replacements.

The Formulation: This text explicitly covers instances where the flour matrix is deeply diluted by cellulose, relying heavily on artificial foaming and emulsification agents to stabilize the crumb structure of the loaf.

How they cheat the "Gluten Problem" at 40%+

If you read the claims sections of these patents, they all share a similar technical strategy to bypass the structural breakdown of the bread:

Vital Wheat Gluten Supplementation: When you remove 40% or 50% of the wheat flour, you also remove the gluten. Every single one of these patents adds concentrated, isolated vital wheat gluten back into the mix to build an artificial "net" for the yeast's gas.

Hydrocolloid Gums: Cellulose doesn't behave like starch. To prevent the water from simply leaking right back out of the baking bread, they load the patent claims with combinations of Xanthan Gum, Carboxymethyl Cellulose (CMC), or Guar Gum to chemically mimic the gelatinization of natural wheat starch.

Translation; these patents indicate that bread in stores is no longer 'bread'. And patents cost a ton of money to register. Would someone spend all that tens of thousands... even hundreds of thousands of dollars on patent lawyers and doing patents if they weren't going to put it into use? No. They have to get that money back. And that means the other bread is just like this stuff. Because its trying to figure out how to make food by scraping pennies. And all of them are trying to do that while inflating their expenses, and saying they are broke.

 

[Meadowlark]

40% + cellulose ...wonder if local bakeries do that also.

 

[nao57]

See attachment in notepad...

Too big to post due to character limit, but doesn't split well.

 

[nao57]

40% + cellulose ...wonder if local bakeries do that also.

Because a lot of it is done at the milling stage of production they might not even know its being done. And that's pretty sad also because a lot of those people want to give people happiness in the food they are cooking. I bet most people have no idea.

 

[Meadowlark]

"The "Wood" in Modern Food is Real, But It Isn't Raw Sawdust"

Reminds me of other famous word parsing..."It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the—if he—if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing"

However, in this case we are talking about our food...my goodness.

 

[Meadowlark]

Because a lot of it is done at the milling stage of production they might not even know its being done.

Correct me if I'm wrong...but it does sound like the flour we purchase over the counter does NOT contain cellulose?

 

[Martin Mikulcik]

See attachment in notepad...

Too big to post due to character limit, but doesn't split well.

So are you going to start growing small grains and staple crops now?

Processed food is a category of its own but i think something i didn't realize was just how processed flour is. White flour is so devoid of anything but calories and when you mill your own grain you get the bran and germ and a coarser grind that leaves you feeling healthier. White flour is suited for desserts not bread. It ain't got no flavor

 

[Chuck]

If you believe AI it states that over the counter All Purpose Flour does NOT contain cellulose as the bran and germ which contain the natural cellulose and dietary fiber has been milled away. Bread Flour contains about 2% cellulose.

It seems as though anything that has "enriched" on the packaging is acutally "unenriched" as all of the "enriched" stuff has been removed from the product.

 

[Meadowlark]

That's what it seems to me also @Chuck.

Homemade (made from scratch) bread should be mostly bread.

 

[Meadowlark]

...White flour is so devoid of anything but calories and when you mill your own grain you get the bran and germ and a coarser grind that leaves you feeling healthier.

I can grow it and have several times in cover crops...but never have harvested the grains or milled them.

Seems like a lot of work and requires equipment I don't have. If I can successfully grow a quality tobacco at home, seems like I should be able to grow and mill some grains.

Would you or anyone care to elaborate on the process of milling your own home-grown grain? .... without a grist mill.

 

[Sluggy]

Buy Canadian flour and make your own bread. Canadian wheat has a high protein content which is useless for brewing beer.

 

[Martin Mikulcik]

I can grow it and have several times in cover crops...but never have harvested the grains or milled them.

Seems like a lot of work and requires equipment I don't have. If I can successfully grow a quality tobacco at home, seems like I should be able to grow and mill some grains.

Would you or anyone care to elaborate on the process of milling your own home-grown grain? .... without a grist mill.

Harvest
It takes like an hour to cut and thresh a bushel of grain. I use a scythe, i believe I've posted a picture before but i just bought the blade, bolted it onto a straight stick with a deer antler handle. And i cut 4ft or so swathes, bundle an armful and wack the ears out into a storage tote. The tote is clumsy but I'm only doing a couple bushels. If i were doing more I'd probably have a big tarp and wack the grain against a stable metal grate. Modern grain threshes very easily. If i were doing even more, that's when you need a barn to store the sheaves now and thresh later. Harvest is kinda at an inconvenient time, late June through July and it's hot. In the past you'd just cut it and store it in the barn because you only have a couple weeks.

Now if your grains are free threshing and don't have hulls, wheat and rye, great. If they have hulls it'll be a little more work. Clean the grain by winnowing and then the first step i do regardless is run it all through a 2 roller mill. Unless it's wet then you have to dry it first. In my climate grain stored in the open will get too wet to mill at times and you'll have to dry it, but from harvest everything should be dry, bite a piece it should be hard. Oats are an exception, they have to be dried they're too oily.

If making beer you'd soak your barley, let it sprout for 5 days, dry it out in the dryer and then you have green malt.

My roller mill is monster mill brand. This milling is quick and easy and breaks everything into grits sized pieces. Drill powered, it can do a bushel in a couple minutes but you usually need 3 or 4 passes to get it as fine as you can. And if you do get one, you gotta be careful not to reduce the gap too quickly or the rollers will seize and the torque can be violent. Same for wet grain it clogs the rollers until they bind

If your grain has tightly adhered chaff, the roller milling is especially important because you want to break the seed in half but not powder it so you can winnow the chaff. This can be done on a normal mill but you really have to reduce pressure on the plates or you'll waste your time grinding the chaff into flour which then you can't separate. Water winnowing works great but then you have dry it back out to finish milling into flour. Chaff cannot be hidden in porridge but small amounts are not really noticed in bread. So if you want to eat barley or spelt or einkorn or proso millet or buckwheat or oats, its all the same, crush the grain and winnow out the chaff

Now that the grain is crushed into grits you can further grind it with a grain mill. My brother has a grain maker brand, i have a chinese. I have mine belt powered driven off the same low speed spade handle drill i use on the roller mill and the sorghum press for that matter. It works great, but it's loud and slower. One pass will give you very fine flour


Sieves are your friend. From 1/4 hardware cloth down.

Often i won't go to the effort of the second mill and I'll stop at the grit consistency. I might sieve out the big particles which are mostly bran. This will be fine for cornmeal or milo. For wheat and triticale and rye, I'll make a 50/50 bread with commercial flour usually softening the grits some with hot water initially. I don't hardly ever buy bread from the store and I'm always doing at least this kind of blend. White flour has no flavor

I got my sorghum all pressed this weekend and if you time it right you get a grain crop as well. And i havent had grain sorghum in a few years but i made a flatbread using 25% sorghum, it was so good I'm still thinking about it

 

[Meadowlark]

Wow, that's a lot of info to digest. Much appreciated.

 

[Meadowlark]

Seriously considering making a run at home made chemical free natural flour (s).

Grains need to be selected and planted next month. A lot of research to do before that...

 

[nao57]

If you believe AI it states that over the counter All Purpose Flour does NOT contain cellulose as the bran and germ which contain the natural cellulose and dietary fiber has been milled away. Bread Flour contains about 2% cellulose.

It seems as though anything that has "enriched" on the packaging is acutally "unenriched" as all of the "enriched" stuff has been removed from the product.

Its way past 2%. 2% was probably around back over 60 years +. Industrialization did this. And people saw that **** Germany was doing it and that they could do it too. That's why Operation Paperclip happened because they wanted to figure out how to do all the things the Germans were doing. So they started copying playbooks of industry, economics, and so on. They did that because of greed.

Right now the bread is probably most of it, it could be anywhere from 25 to 50% cellulose. A lot of people are really sick all the time. People in my family haven't been able to eat bread most their life some of them.

Its way above 2%...

And its easily verifiable how big the percentage is. I did some other research where I used AI to help me on the calculations of how to estimate the %s of lumber flour in bread based on how slowly the bread decayed over time compared with how long it SHOULD decay at. I'll post it below. Bear in mind this is an AI extrapolation ESTIMATE. so it could be adjusted later if something is off;

Below is another research page I did for that calculation;


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Bread used to be able to store for 3 to 5 days before the industrial era. This was before the bread was adulterated by things being put in the bread that aren't wheat flour ingredients. Please show me a table estimate of how long it would be estimated to be last by adding 5% cellulose to the flour, then 10%, and so on until 50%. show that in a chart.
CSV icon
cellulose_...shelf_life
CSV

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/gg-dl/AFfU-fITOe9gzzdcH-W0H0SGPdZ0kBQYsS-R3lNETEU-BNR0MLamUsviP9JjuRN5zsS3fdZHEEF5bgINO01SpaTWWZMuo1MPrfRDlykK0-so10e7OVQzTRcQ0vD0ccbuZxp7rIi3HFQy7BBeilcBoykRobm8e2PW8x4ut4aowMwikPgSOY6OEA=s1600

Historically, before the industrial era, traditional bread made solely from wheat flour, water, salt, and yeast typically had a short shelf life of 3 to 5 days before it succumbed to physical staling (hardening due to starch retrogradation) or microbial spoilage (mold growth).

During the Industrial Revolution, bread adulteration became widespread as unscrupulous commercial bakers added fillers like alum, chalk, plaster of Paris, and even sawdust (which is primarily cellulose) to artificially whiten loaves, add weight, or retain water. In modern food science, purified forms of cellulose (such as microcrystalline cellulose or carboxymethyl cellulose) are safely used in small concentrations (typically 1% to 3%) specifically to bind water, maintain softness, and extend shelf life.

[Edited in later; the AI response blamed the bakers but actually it would have been messed with at the milling stage. The bakers don't have milling ability or resources themselves and that's the tell. Think of how many bakers have a backyard of milling equipment; they don't. That part the AI was off.]

Because cellulose is an insoluble fiber that does not provide an easily digestible nutrient substrate for common bread molds (such as Penicillium or Aspergillus) and binds moisture tightly, increasing its percentage reduces the amount of fermentable wheat flour and alters water activity. Below is an estimation model demonstrating how increasing cellulose content from 0% up to 50% mathematically impacts the theoretical mold-free shelf life of a loaf, along with a corresponding chart.

Estimated Shelf Life Table
Cellulose Content (%) Flour Content (%) Estimated Shelf Life (Days) Characteristics / Food Science Impact
0% 100% 4.0 Baseline traditional pre-industrial bread; stales or molds naturally.
5% 95% 4.8 Modern standard high-fiber/extended shelf life level; enhanced moisture retention.
10% 90% 5.6 Noticeable loss in gluten structure; bread becomes denser but resists drying out.
15% 85% 6.4 Crumb becomes increasingly crumbly; starch retrogradation is heavily disrupted.
20% 80% 7.2 Significant reduction in available nutrients for mold; volume decreases.
25% 75% 8.0 Bread begins to take on a dry, wood-like structural profile.
30% 70% 8.8 Severely degraded gluten network; crumbly texture but highly mold-resistant.
35% 65% 9.6 High moisture-binding capability with minimal starch available for staling.
40% 60% 10.4 Approaching historical "famine bread" quality; highly unpalatable but long-lasting.
45% 55% 11.2 Extremely low nutrient substrate slows down any bacterial or fungal spoilage.
50% 50% 12.0 Half-cellulose composite; effectively a rigid, non-perishable brick.
Summary of the Data and Visual Trend
The generated line chart displays a steady linear projection of shelf-life extension as cellulose replaces wheat flour.

At 0% cellulose, the bread lasts an average of 4.0 days.

By the time the filler content reaches 25%, the estimated shelf life doubles to 8.0 days.

At a extreme adulteration level of 50% cellulose, the shelf life extends to 12.0 days.

While a higher percentage of cellulose drastically extends the time it takes for bread to physically show mold or completely dry out, it comes at a severe cost to human nutrition, flavor, and structural integrity.

The complete dataset has been saved to the workspace as cellulose_bread_shelf_life.csv and the visual representation can be found in cellulose_shelf_life_chart.png.

in regards to the above, what's the highest % of cellulose ratio added to wheat flour that's been attempted so far?
In food science research, product development, and patent literature, scientists and bakers have pushed the limits of replacing wheat flour with cellulose much further than one might expect—reaching up to 60% in peer-reviewed academic studies and up to 100% in patent formulations.

The maximum replacement levels depend heavily on whether the goal is to make a standard edible loaf of bread or a highly specialized "dietary" food product:

1. In Academic Food Research (20% to 60%)
For Bread (20% to 30% maximum): In standard academic studies looking at dough rheology (how dough stretches and behaves), researchers rarely push past 20% to 30% replacement for traditional yeasted bread. Beyond 20%, the dilution of the gluten network is so severe that the dough completely loses its elasticity and its ability to trap gas (CO
2
) during fermentation, resulting in a dense, unrisen slab.

For Cakes and Biscuits (Up to 60%): Because cakes and biscuits rely heavily on chemical leaveners (baking powder) and fat/sugar matrices rather than a strong gluten network, researchers have pushed the boundaries much higher. A classic food science study published in PubMed specifically tested up to a 60% volume-for-volume replacement of flour with microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) in cakes and biscuits. The study noted that while high-quality properties were maintained up to 40% in cakes and 20% in biscuits, the 60% threshold was explicitly attempted to measure the absolute point of structural failure.

2. In Patent Literature and Specialized "Diet Foods" (50% to 100%)
When moving away from traditional bread-making techniques into commercial low-calorie or modern "zero-carb/keto" baking, the boundaries disappear completely:

The 100% Cellulose Attempt: Inventors have successfully patented formulations that entirely eliminate wheat flour. For example, European Patent EP0086527A2 outlines a method for producing low-calorie baked products where 50% to 100% of the flour is replaced entirely with cellulose.

How it works at 100%: To make "bread" out of pure cellulose, you cannot use traditional yeast or water. The flour is substituted with purified alpha-cellulose or microcrystalline cellulose, and the structural properties of gluten are artificially simulated using complex hydrocolloids (like xanthan gum, guar gum, or carboxymethyl cellulose), emulsifiers, and liquid polyol polyesters (fat substitutes).

What happens when you actually bake at these extreme levels?
If you try to bake a loaf using the 50% estimate from the previous model without adding specialized chemical binders, the mixture behaves less like dough and more like wet sand. Because cellulose has a massive Water Absorption Index (WAI), it ruthlessly steals water from any remaining wheat proteins. The resulting bake does not rise, does not undergo the Maillard reaction (browning of the crust), has a completely chalky mouthfeel, and is virtually impossible for the human stomach to digest in large quantities.

[Edited in later after AI response; Part of what got me noticing and asking this stuff was that I'd seen a youtube video where someone was showing how they could play with the bread slice from the store like Play-doh. And then after they smashed it into a ball the bread went back to just like it'd never been smashed. Another video the guy runs water through the bread slice and it doesn't dissolve like it should. That was cellulose that caused that in both videos. And bread used to dissolve in water. That helped me see that the cellulose content is way higher than it should. Then I just used guiding questions with AI to do the math for me.]