The Goods Are Odd

Over the past few months I’ve changed my relationship with these sourdough beasties I’ve befriended to leaven and flavor my baked goods. I’ve both expanded the amount and variety of goods that I can make with them and I’ve let the little things be warm and active for longer periods. That is to say by keeping my sourdough active I’ve been forced to bake more with it and have thus figured out new and varied breads that can be made as sourdough.

The whole point, for me, of baking with sourdough is to use a biologically diverse population of microbes to populate the dough I make to allow a slower rise through fermentation. This process is active and alive and breaks down the stuff in wheat that is hard on human digestion (gluten) or makes other things (like minerals) inaccessible through human digestion (phytic acid)

Percentage of Phytic Acid

Time (hours)
—- Yeast Fermentation
___ Sourdough Fermentation

For more than you probably want to know about phytic acid and the extra measures you could go to to eliminate your intake of it go here.

The fact that phytic acid is in all foods that are originally seeds (grains, nut, legumes) and that it binds to certain minerals and nutrients in the body and essentially flushes them out, doing the body little good, is a fact that is not debated. What the impact is of the amount eaten on the body’s overall health is not agreed upon. But just think of how many seeds we eat: wheat, corn, soy, nuts. Since these foods are present in practically every meal, I like to error on the side of caution and avoid the anti-nutrients as much as possible. Here is a nice outline of why a sourdough ferment of grains is good for health (In fact that blog, just linked to, is one I’ve just discovered, and it full of great sourdough recipes. I haven’t tried any yet, but plan to…check it out!)

So that’s the motivation in trying to replace as many baked-goods as possible with their (I think more delicious) sourdough versions. Once you get beyond artisan crusty bread loafs from a good bakery it is hard to find an array of true sourdough items. Even if you find something that is “sourdough” that doesn’t necessarily mean that all the flour has gone through a minimum four hour ferment, a lot of sourdough is added as flavor.

As usual the best control over health, quality, and taste is just to make it at home, not to mention the saved plastic packaging and inexpensive ingredients which may make the cost of the homemade lower (though it depends on what you were buying). Below are some of the snacks I’ve put through the sourdough process. And I should mention that the recipes for these lovely eats all come from the same book, Wild Bread by Lisa Rayner. For the most part I like her recipes, but she is vegan so she often suggests Earth Balance over butter which to me is a very unwise substitution. It just boggles me that one can be so into natural and whole foods but prefer a product that requires a laboratory to make and comes in plastic over one that can be made and eaten out in a field.

In addition to getting a new book that expanded my sense of what I could do with my sourdough, I also starting using it (the starter) a bit differently. First of all I started a whole wheat starter from my white one, so now I have two (The whole wheat is local from Massa Organics!) I keep the whole wheat one dryer (or stiffer, or to get technical, at a lower hydration- 75% which would be 3/4c water to 1c flour. 100% is an even one to one.) I also stopped putting the starter in the fridge after use. I keep some in the fridge for back up, but I keep the active one warm and fed…that way, when I want to bake I don’t have to back track the time it takes a cold starter to get going. If you keep your refrigerated tarter fed consistently you can get it going in 8hrs but it’s hard for me to remember to do so if I don’t see it. (Ofen it would be a two day process just to be able to use the thing…) Rather than get the out-of-sight-out-of-mind problem, I leave them out, which reminds me to feed them, which gets me to bake.

Crunchy whole wheat crackers:

There are fewer and fewer aisles in the grocery store I even go down at all and the cracker/cookie aisle is one of them. Even if natural or organic it’s still just plan old cooked wheat (or popped rice) and it just doesn’t do me much good. But crackers are great! For homemade hummus, tuna salad, or a sharp raw cheddar. If you already have made your own pizza dough, crackers are just as easy.

These are a 100% whole grain cracker  The recipe uses only 6oz of starter plus 8oz of any combination of tasty flours you might have such as rye, spelt, kamut. (I’ve used various mixes of wheat, rye, spelt as that’s what I tend to have on hand. The majority of the dough has been wheat though). (Also added is 2 Tbs olive oil, 1/2 tsp salt, and just under a half cup of water.)

After the dough is mixed and kneaded into a stiff ball it can sit for a few hours. (Lisa Rayner says you can let it sit for as little as 20 minutes, but that time frame doesn’t really do the fermenting job. I just let it go until I notice it being bigger…about four hours.) The dough is rolled as thin as you can manage onto a floured board and/or on parchment paper without going beyond the point that you can lift the strips onto your baking sheet. I had tried baking just the rolled out dough, figuring I could just break it into crackers after it cooked…but it ended up too uneven, not crunchy in the middle and burnt on the edges, so it is worth it to cut and cook strips…they can be a very rough cut.

This is a good opportunity to train your nose to when something is done. The crackers should be checked after five minutes and rotated and shaken around. They should get all the way to a nice caramel brown…but the tipping point to burnt is quick…so keep a careful eye (and nose!) I added Celtic sea salt and sesame seeds to the top before cutting the dough…lots of possibilities with toppings.

Everyone has these nostalgic foods from childhood that they just can’t help feeling great when they eat them. I am all for having good emotional memory with food…but often the actual substance from the past isn’t really all that great (in taste or health). I grew up in a very whole foods lacto/ovo/fish vegetarian household that didn’t include really any junk food. I could be easily motivated to do something if it involved some sort of illicit food…like a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin (though we still got it without the bacon/sausage). So, I’ve taken this childhood reward and made it the kind of thing I still want to eat.

The dough is the standard “artisan dough” in the Wild Bread book with a whopping 20 oz of starter, just about 7 oz of starter under 3 oz of water and 1.5 tsp of salt. This mixture rises in a bowl, then gets rolled out and cut to rise again as muffins.

Then the fun part! The muffins like fat pancake on a lightly buttered griddle. I ended up cooking them longer that this photo shows. In order to get them cooked through they should have a decent amount of color on both sides.

Then I cooked up an egg. This trick above doesn’t really work all that well, maybe if the ring was oiled better. The other option might be to make bigger muffins. I break the yoke after it cooks for a bit so it isn’t too drippy for the sandwich. Add some raw jack cheese, oblong fried potato cake not included and I certainly earned it!

Below shows the basic loaf bread I’ve been making on a weekly basis (give or take). It’s the same dough as the English muffin. I use a mix of my whole wheat and white starter and use either fresh ground wheat berries (also from Massa Organics), or fresh ground spelt, or just Massa’s flour which is ground fresher than anything else you can buy. This is a pretty similar recipe as the Nourishing Traditions loaf made in this post, but you can see how it’s lightened up a bit. This has to do with an even wetter dough and also a double proof, once in a bowl and once in the buttered loaf pan.

It’s a pretty nice, go-to whole grain loaf for toast and snacks. But I am pretty excited about trying this one from the recently discovered Wild Yeast Blog. I think something even lighter would do us better for sandwiches (the bread below is pretty limited to open-faced, which are delicious. Two pieces at once would be a mouthful)

This bread is a sourdough “quick bread” in that it is made from a batter and is not kneaded. But no, it isn’t quick.

A few words on the time it takes to make these baked goods: This point is related to one of Michael Pollan’s new food rules that you can eat junk food, just make it yourself. When you cook at home you can control ingredients and you don’t have access to the kind of processing or additives that happens on an industrial scale. You also find that “junk foods” take a long time to make and are energy intensive, versus simple whole foods. As I write this post I am actually taking a week without dairy, sugar, or grains. This is just a just an opportunity to eat really simply and avoid foods that can be harder on digestion than others.

I think taking a break from anything you eat a lot of is probably a good idea…seasonal variation does this with fruits and veggies and even some meats and certainly pastured eggs, but the constants can be…well just that. Really milk and grains would be more seasonal in a more locally-based food system.

I don’t know if I would go as far as saying the foods that you do the least to are the foods we should be eating. That essentially would be advocating a raw diet. I do think human digestion needs some careful processing to break down cellulose and other compounds we don’t have the stomachs for. But it is true that many of the foods you can eat “whole” are good for you and the more “whole” you eat a food the faster it is to eat it. An apple can be picked and eaten right at the same moment. Meat- well a life is made and raise and then killed, but after that it’s pretty much eaten as is. Bread on the other hand, even good, whole grain, naturally leavened bread goes through a number of steps. This isn’t a hard and fast rule by any means but the point is if we limited our baked-good intake to sourdough bread we made at home, we would probably eat a lot less bread and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

So, I’m happy to have created a system with bread that is rather self-limiting and happy to be taking a bit of a break…but also really happy to get back to baking soon. This bread below could be adapted into any number of quick bread loaf pan recipes like banana bread. I’ve just done this cinnamon raisin version and it’s lovely, moist, sour and delicious. I am pretty sure it could also be adapted into muffins, which is an experiment I am excited about and will certainly share. I’ve never seem to come across a true sourdough (that is, fully fermented) muffin recipe. I think it might involve some baking soda…but well see. Stay tuned.