Transcriber: Chih Ying (Naomi) Chuang Reviewer: Ile Mon
This is a rye bread.
I made this rye bread with my hands.
But this is so much more than a rye bread.
This is also about life, about society, about community,
about you, and about connection.
We heard about connection earlier.
Connection is what binds us together.
And it is so important to have a good life, to be connected.
And I am going to tell you why
this rye bread is so much more than a rye bread.
Seeds.
Has anybody had rye seeds in their hands before?
Yeah, a few.
Great!
I have it right here.
I don't know if you can see it.
This is seeds.
These are rye seeds and they represent life.
They can become this bread
and if I grow this really well,
I can have a lot of rye bread.
The reason why I think seeds are so important is because
they grow our food.
Without the seeds, we can't have food
and seeds also represent biodiversity.
Biodiversity on this planet is extremely important
if we don't have biodiversity,
we will not have a variety of food,
we won't have trees, flowers,
we wouldn't have humans.
Diversity is really important.
Think about biodiversity like your friends.
You don't want to have one friend.
You would like to have lots of different friends.
Some you can talk to about different things
and it's the same with food.
If we did not have biodiversity
you can think about having to eat perogies or lasagna
for all your meals everyday.
That wouldn't be exciting.
It wouldn't tempt you as much.
So therefore, seeds are really really important to us.
In a lot of ways they are kind of under threat.
Because there are companies who tried to own these seeds
so we can't decide ourselves
the range of biodiversity we want.
Therefore, in all your TEDx bags
there is a little bag of these rye seeds for you
and I want you to think of them as diamonds.
These are your new diamonds.
And I really mean it.
You can do a lot of different things with the seeds I'm giving you.
You can go home and boil them
and put them into a soup.
Or you can boil them and make a salad,
you'll get inspired in the lunch later, on how you could do that.
You can also just let them sit next to your computer
on your desk to remind you
that you have a responsibility to make sure
we have biodiversity on this planet.
You can also give it to somebody who can grow them
and you will get some rye coming out of the soil.
That is fantastic.
I love rye.
And why do I love rye?
First of all because I am a chef.
And I love everything that tastes good.
And rye tastes really really good
as you can see in the pictures
lots of things come out of rye
and you can cook it and eat it
you can put it in your cakes, you can put it in bread,
you can do all kinds of different things with it.
And when you are a chef,
the first thing you think about
is flavor
and cooking really wonderful meals
that you can share with other people.
And all the rests starts.
How is that possible?
Does it have to be clean, fair?
And all these issues that go into food
is the next step.
Because if it doesn't taste good
I can't tempt you to change your ways.
So the first thing you have to think about is,
it has to taste good.
Rye,
is only responsible for one percent
of the grains that we have here on planet Earth
so there's not a lot.
I don't know if you know this
but there is actually a rye border in the world
it goes all the way through Europe
and we are on the north of the rye border.
South of the rye border, they don't really eat rye.
I don't know if you've ever had a rye bread in Spain
or in France, Italy.
No, rye is something that grows in the northern hemisphere
it grows extremely well.
It likes cold weather,
it's very resilient,
so therefore, if you have poor soil, it will also grow there
and it has always been a tradition here.
It comes from the middle east
but in the medieval [times]
it started growing here and it became a huge commodity.
It made a lot of people rich.
Grow communities.
And Poland was in the 1400s
about one of the biggest rye producers in North Europe.
So we have this rye border and that just shows
that on the northern part of Europe
we have a lot in common when it comes to our food culture
and our diet because we have the same climate
and we grow the same things
and here we can make a huge exchange
and see what we can offer each other.
But we are going to make some bread.
From this wonderful grain, I can get flour.
Flour is important as well.
Can you all see that?
I wish you could feel it,
because it has a very coarse texture
This flour is stone ground in a mill
small producer in Copenhagen.
It's also organic.
It's one of my favorite kinds of flours.
I think flour should be stone ground
and I think it's very important
that we take some of that old fashion ways of doing it,
in a new technology so that we have smaller mills
that doesn't care about how long shelf life you have in the supermarket.
And why is that?
That is because
when you have this beautiful flour you see here
the germ is still in here.
In this little seed
- could be very difficult for you to see -
in this little seed, inside here is the very little thing called the germ
and for one of you don't know it the germ is very important.
It has a little bit of oil and it has vitamin E.
Vitamin E is responsible for fertility
therefore a very very important thing.
Industry takes out the germ
because then they can have shelf life of two years of flour
if you don't take out the germ it's only about seven to eight months.
So you can see this is about money
this is not about your health, it is not about taste
it's about money.
Therefore you should support small local millers
who do stone ground the flour,
it does mean something.
Both to your health
but also to understand using the whole of the grain.
We have had mills around Europe.
You don't see them anymore.
Now they are inside factories.
But we still have them in the landscape.
Along rivers, on a hill somewhere
you will see those beautiful old mills
you know, very romantic, and so forth.
But they were a really important part of our tradition and our history.
And if you think about how many things you can say about millers.
"He came first to the mill".
It means you will get taken care of first
that comes from history because you would have all your grains
and you would go the miller and it could take two days
for you to get there.
And you'd travel as fast as you could
because you wanted to get in line first
otherwise you could wait for days to have your grains milled.
So a lot of life was centered around millers
and societies and communities were actually,
you know, built around the mills
because there was a lot of work to be done
there were a lot of activities and there was bread
and bread has been part of our stable diets
for many many hundred years.
So therefore the mill has had a center
nowadays we don't see them and a lot of them are huge industrial ones
and they do not stone ground.
They do a different way, sorry I cannot say it in English.
But if you go to small millers,
you can still see the craftmanship
even though it's in an enclosed environment
and you get that feel that this [slower] process
where you don't waste anything,
you just use the whole grain,
that is the way forward, and also back to the taste
- it gives really wonderful taste.
Okay, rye bread.
Can you see this?
Is it possible?
It has life.
It has bubbles but you can't smell it, sorry.
I wish you could.
It has a very nice sour smell.
This is a traditional Danish rye bread.
This is how we make it and you will taste it
for lunch today.
This rye bread is made of a little bit of wheat
but mostly rye flour.
The coarse one you have here.
And you have the recipe in you bag. So there is no excuse.
And then this is sourdough.
This is the secret. This is life.
This sourdough
is mine and it's 25 years old.
I started it 25 years ago when I got married, and had children
and I thought I am going to make rye bread everyday for my family now,
because it's so tasty and so healthy and this is my culture.
So I take this and I've already done it because
I had to do it the day before
so this has been sitting for 24 hours.
First my sourdough, some water, some rye flour, some wheat
and you stir it for five minutes like this.
And you cover it and you let it sit for 24 hours.
24 hours have gone
and now it's day number 2.
And my other part of the work is going to be done.
I add some water and cracked rye seeds.
The cracked rye seeds give really beautiful texture.
As you will taste later, for lunch,
and I just stir it.
I have to work on this for another 3 to 5 minutes.
This bread is very runny.
So I don't knead it with my hands.
And normally I would say most bread
is kneaded with your hands
and that is a very very important skill.
Because even though baking is scientific
and you can come up with all these chemical rules
you don't have to know them.
You can learn to feel the dough with texture.
Why do I want you to bake bread?
Because baking a bread is a life skill.
If you go home and bake a bread,
and get to understand the difference in this
I can feel if it's right
I can smell it, I can see it on my kitchen table
do I have to leave if to a few more hours, or can I just bake it now?
It is a life skill knowledge
that I think is extremely important because if you know that
you know how you can survive.
But you also will know how to appreciate
the bakers' work in your community.
That baker who gets up at one o'clock
and goes into the bakery and bakes.
And he uses his intuition his knowledge and his experience.
because it's in the hands.
And I tell you, if you do a really nice dough, with wheat, or spelt or emmer,
with all these wonderful grains that we have
and you start learning, and start to get to know it
there is nothing better.
It's like a little baby.
It feels so wonderful
and it gives you this nourishment
and the beautiful bread in the end.
Okay.
So this is my dough
and I'm pouring it in to this tin.
So I went to visit a Polish baker
it's called "My father's bakery" in English.
I can't say it in Polish, I'm sorry.
He's baking from my recipe all the rye bread
that we're eating today.
And he told me all about the tradition here in Poland.
How bakers have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years
how they have traveled from Poland's history
and Poland's division between different countries
so you have influences
from Hungary, from Germany, from Austria and so forth.
But he also really said, it was very difficult
to get really good bakers
because everybody goes to the industry.
And the industry, it all happens in really closed machines.
Whereas in a bakery, it's about your skills,
it's about your hands, it's about that touch.
And the baker can go and look at the dough
feel it a little bit and say no,
it needs two more hours or say
today we have to put it into the oven for three minutes more
because I know this feels right.
That is craftsmanship.
That is about making.
And I truly truly believe
if we lose that, we lose something in our society
that is very important.
Because that connection
is about our community also.
Because if you think about a lively community
even if it's a small society
or if you live in an urban very big city
with millions and millions of people
you want to have a community connection where you live.
How do you create that?
Yeah, I believe you do that through food.
I know we can't all go back
to [having] everything done on the street where we live
but I don't think we should give up food.
I think that if you have a bakery
in your street where you can go to buy bread in the morning
and sometimes you bake it yourself because I think you can do both,
we are living busy lives,
but [bread] creates jobs, creates an atmosphere
because the way I see it is we have to have jobs
we have to have livlidhood where we live
we can't just live somewhere and travel for two hours
and then go to work
and come back to live somewhere where there is no life.
We like to have bars, restaurants
but we also like to have bakers, butchers, small shops
that create that community and that society.
The other thing is all the gossip.
Think about what connects a society,
that's all the little stories that we know about each other.
Oh, he had a child, they were getting married,
all of this wonderful little stories
that all tell us what goes on in our lives
the connnection
that can happen in a bakery.
The lady in the bakery selling the bread,
she knows so much about what goes on in the community
that's actually a knowledge we all want to talk into.
You know, I don't mind Facebook, I like it I am on Twitter, it's not like that
but I don't think that all the connections we have should be there.
We also need that in our community.
Of course,
the other thing is that bread -
here is another big two kilo brick of loaf -
you can't build houses with it
you can only eat it
but isn't it beautiful? No?
(Applause)
And in very short time you are going to eat this.
I just want to say really quickly.
So this rises for another 5 to 6 hours and then I bake it for 2 hours.
Recipe in the bag. No excuse.
And we'll have a sourdough thing later so you can get it home
if you don't want to start from the beginning.
But think about what I just did.
It took me 30 hours,
I worked about 15 minutes on it altogether
it takes care of itself, it ferments,
it just does the work because it's alive
and the industry
they bake a bread like this in an hour.
This bread company in Denmark,
they do 6 tons of rye bread an hour.
And you cannot tell me that is the same quality
and the same taste
as this lovely bread I have here,
or the one the baker I went and saw, he did two tryouts of my bread
we stand there, we had a real discussion about flavour
where should it go, things like that.
That kind of craftsmanship is something I would really like
in my life and have access to
not only in my own kitchen
but also when I go out to buy it.
So I just want to say this bread
can initiate a conversation about
what kind of life do we want to live.
What kind of communities do we want?
Do we have responsibilities where we live?
Do we want to create lively spaces
where there is a lot of interactions?
Think about that food is the other language
that has always connected human beings.
When the Greeks went to discuss very important topics
they went to the market.
They went where the food was.
We have a shared history
we have been breaking bread all through our history
and I think we should still believe
that we should do that as human beings.
So what I am going to say to you is
go home and bake a bread.
Learn this craftmanship.
Go out and seek some quality flours
and understand the whole connection
between the seed, the flour and this rye bread in the end.
I truly believe that we as people
by understanding this step by step
can enable change in our society
and get a better place to live for all of us
where more equality
where we all have a right to a decent meal a day.
Thank you very much.
(Aplause)