Healthful bread just like your grandmother used to make

Christine Jackson remembers making bread dough, eating it and throwing it on the ceiling as a child.

"From the time she was very little she used to help me," said Arla Funk, Jackson's mother.

Now Jackson, who has five children of her own, is running her family's bakery, the Sugarhouse Bread Co., and her mother works beside her.

They don't make airy bread at the bakery, Jackson says.

"We make a chewier, denser bread like your grandmother would make," she said.

Jackson developed the recipes for the breads in her home in New Hampshire through trial and error and used them in her bakery near the Vermont border from 1997 to 2001.

The basic recipe has five ingredients — honey, yeast, flour, eggs and salt. No oils, preservatives, fats or chemicals. Jackson estimated that most conventional breads have between 20 and 30 ingredients.

"The whole idea was to do healthy breads," Jackson said.

She had to close her bakery because her husband's job took them to Belgium, but she taught her two brothers how to run their own bakery and they started the Sugarhouse Bread Co. almost two years ago with the help of other family members. Jackson ended up moving to Utah, and when her brothers decided to spend less time at the bakery, Jackson took over management duties.

Now she arrives at the Sugarhouse Bread Co. at 4 every morning to start baking. She uses flour that is ground at the bakery between huge stones — the old-fashioned way — giving the bread a richer flavor, she says, and keeping the bread fresh.

The fresh-ground flour is why the Sugarhouse Bread Co. doesn't need to use preservatives, she said. Regular flour is already old by the time it is used because it has sat on a shelf at a warehouse and at a store, she said.

"Our bread will stay fresh on your counter for a week," Jackson said.

Jackson bakes several kinds of breads: white, wheat, cinnamon-swirl, banana, pumpkin, zucchini, seven-grain, anise, challah and cardamom.

While the main bread recipes came from Jackson, some of the other breads — banana, zucchini, anise, cardamom and pumpkin — came from her mother. Those breads were added to the menu after the bakery started so it would be a little different from other bakeries, Jackson said.

Funk, who has a bachelor's in home economics from the University of Utah and a master's in food nutrition from Cornell, gathered the recipes throughout her life, Funk said.

A coworker of Funk's taught her how to make anise bread, she said, which is like pound cake with a licorice flavor.

Another coworker taught her how to make cardamom bread, Funk said, a sweet bread used in Scandinavia.