Meet Michael Mastropasqua | Co-founder of Seacrest Sourdough

We had the good fortune of connecting with Michael Mastropasqua and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Michael, do you disagree with some advice that is more or less universally accepted?
That high cholesterol (LDL) should be feared because it causes heart disease. The keyword here is: causes. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that high cholesterol on its own does not cause heart disease. There is actually a storm of other factors that must combine with high cholesterol in order to cause heart disease. For example obesity + high cholesterol and/or oxidized LDL caused by omega-6s (unnatural oils found in processed foods) + high cholesterol levels are two scenarios in which heart disease is likely. But again cholesterol is not the only factor.

This is such an important subject to us for two reasons: the conventional advice is used to demonize what are truly the most nutritious foods on the planet in terms of bioavailable nutrients – meat and eggs. And secondly the narrative effectively scares people and teaches them to take nutrition advice as gospel without any thought whatsoever into what the actual truth is or their own power over the information.

So if cholesterol is not the only factor in heart disease, and the most nutritious foods on the planet result in higher cholesterol, then the better advice in our opinion is to pay much more attention to the co-factors of heart disease. Don’t limit yourself on the best foods in the world for you, limit yourself on the foods that cause the co-factors: the highly processed foods, the super sugary foods, the pesticide and herbicide ridden foods!

In sort of an indirect way, this is the premise our business is built on. While we believe meat, eggs, fruits, and honey are the most nutritious foods for you, we also love bread and believe it can be good for the soul. It’s a happy food that instills a sense of both freedom when you know your baker or make your own, and togetherness when enjoyed with family.

But today’s conventional and grocery store bread is full of all the crap mentioned above that leads to unhealthiness and are co-factors of heart disease. Crap such as processed oils high in omega-6s, high fructose corn syrup, undigestible synthetic nutrients and pesticides. In the same way meat and eggs get demonized for causing heart disease, bread gets demonized for the bloating and the sluggishness and the overall crappy feeling you get after eating it. But it’s not bread in general that’s the problem, it’s what’s in the bread.

So we make bread that we thrive on, and that we hope others can thrive on as well. In our bread, wild yeast breaks down most of the gluten through fermentation. There are no pesticides or herbicides in the organic flour we use for our bread. There are no additives or preservatives. Our main loaf is only made of organic flour, the cleanest water possible (purified by reverse osmosis), and ancient sea salt free of microplastics. Our inclusion loaves get their flavors only from whole foods such as organic garlic, herbs or onions. We make true long-fermented sourdough.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
At Seacrest Sourdough we hope that our focus on quality of ingredients both sets us apart and then eventually stops setting us apart from others. To explain: we started this business to offer bread that healthy people can actually continue to thrive on while having it as a part of their diet. That means long fermentation to break down the gluten and anti nutrients in the grains. It also means extreme focus on the quality of the ingredients. So the flour has to be organic and pesticide/herbicide free, the salt has to be free of modern pollutants and microplastics, the water has to be purified by the cleanest method possible, and so on. There can’t be any undigestible synthetic nutrients or flavors, there can’t be any cheap, highly processed oils or syrups, etc. Right now that extreme focus on quality of ingredients and how they effect you sets us apart, but we hope one day that more and more businesses will wake up and start focusing on the long term effects of their ingredients. When we all have a better baseline of quality food, everyone will be happier and healthier.

We’re extremely excited about the future. Sourdough is the first step in our master plan of helping people reconnect to their food systems. The next obvious step that we’re excited about is finding local produce gardens and farms for the ingredients in our inclusion loaves. We want you to be able to see every step of the way every ingredient you eat takes. That’s how people will start taking their health back and reconnecting to the earth and each other in a real way.

We’re still very young as a business, but it wasn’t easy at all to even get this far. Trust is what got us through. Through every challenge it was Kristen and I’s trust in each other and in our vision that helped us overcome. Financial, operational, ingredient sourcing, the technical aspects of baking – wherever the challenge lied one of us had intuition on how to solve it and the other trusted the intuition while providing honest feedback and support. So far it’s worked.

We use the phrase “fiesta forever” a lot. We’re surfers who enjoy life outdoors. In order to do so you need energy and mental clarity. We started baking sourdough to cut out the inflammatory ingredients in conventional and grocery store bread. We just wanted clean, fresh bread in the house. Now we want to share that same fermented goodness with you and anyone looking to cut the crap out of their lives so that they can thrive as much as humanly possible!

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
If they were coming up to Boynton Beach we’d spend most of our time at the beach. Surfing and hanging out. Most beach parks have grills, we’d bring some charcoal, some steaks and of course some sourdough. It’d be a week long camping surf trip-esque vibe, but while sleeping in the comfort of our home. Hopefully there would be some waves haha.

If we were headed to Miami it would be a similar vibe, but fishing instead of surfing. We’d rent a little farmhouse in the Redlands and spend the days between fishing Biscayne Bay and Everglades National Park. We’d still be grilling and checking South Beach for waves.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
First and foremost, my co-founder Kristen Filippidis, the heart and soul of this operation.

Karen, who runs the Green Market Pompano Beach. She was the first outside of our immediate circle to believe in us and she made some baller moves to make sure we were at her markets. We’re forever grateful to Karen for getting us started.

Taylor, Caleb, Mike and Emi – our taste testers, impromptu photographers and miscellaneous helpers. They’re always there when we need them.

Michelle and Nick, Ralph and Carmen, Beverly and Paul, our parents who helped with initial funding and support.

Alexandra Vitale of Nauti by Nature Design. Our business buddy who’s always looking out for us. She was the one who recommended us for this post.

We are consistently inspired by the brands trying to do good in the this world through reconnecting people to real food and nutrition: Heart & Soil, Cairnspring Mills, White Oak Pastures, Dutch Meadows and many more.

Website: https://seacrestsourdough.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seacrest_sourdough

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100088880103389