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.

                          

I had fun showing off my artisan multi-grain sourdough bread but it took three days of my visit to prepare and was gone in a few hours. Wanting mama and all to have the most nutritious bread I decided to try a more quick and dirty recipe.

I prepared a quart of my starter and then mixed it with about 6 cups of spelt flour, the recipe (from Nourishing Traditions) said to rise from 4 to 12 hours depending on the temperature. I let it go overnight, which was probably too long as it got a bit deflated. I didn’t have loaf pans, so they were kind of batard style loaves. The shap of the slice wasn’t ideal but the flavor was wonderful and went great with the raw cream cheese spread I made.

As soon as I got home I started on another batch. This time I started with spelt berries and ground the flour myself. It sounds like a job for a toiling little red hen, but it’s just an electric gadget and doesn’t take any effort, but yields the freshest flour you can get, ensuring no rancidity. Spelt is a nice grain for home grinding because its gluten level perform like an all-purpose flour, which is actually a mix of soft and hard wheat. So, unless you want to grind two different grains, spelt is a lot simpler.

In my first go at grain grinding I just followed the directions and ground the whole berries on the finest setting, which gave me two distinct layers of flour, a fibery hull and a fine powdering flour. I used it as it came for the bread, which turned out delicious and hearty. After some expert advice, on the next batch I first ground the berries on a coarse setting and then ran it through again on the smallest setting which gave me a much more even flour and more flour per cup of berries (which seems to be about 2.5 c. of flour to 1 c. berries, but it depends on your grind- I am still working out that ratio)

The recipe called for the dough to be soft and easy to work with. To knead Sally says to stretch and fold, a different kneading process that I usually use.

I have now made three batches of the bread and the best results actually came from making the dough in my Kitchen-Aid mixer with the dough hook. The pictures below are from the batch made by hand, and it turns out beautifully, but the mixer does allow a wetter dough since you dont have to add more flour to be able to handle it. This was my fist time making dough with a machine and it left me standing there watching it, sort of wondering what I should do while it worked. It was strange to not be able to feel the dough change. So, I am still a bit conflicted about the thing. I was also hesitant to do sourdoughs in metal, but apparently it makes no difference.

Cooked in a loaf pan, this bread makes a great homemade substitute for sliced sandwich bread. Not the handsomest, but probably the freshest, healthy bread you can get in your mouth.

                          

Homemade mayo now sits next to homemade salad dressing and is becoming one less processed packaged food we get pre-made. This change is mostly because you cannot find mayonnaise made with olive oil, only canola, though there are some new (expensive!) variations that include other healthier oils, but are still based on canola. Homemade also just means less packaging and things to buy.

This process of weeding out packaged foods always reminds me of those essentials I don’t produce. I can’t make my own olive oil and at this point I don’t have chickens. That would be an exciting next step to self-reliance.

I make this by hand, you can definitely use a food processor. Start with an egg yolk from a happy bug-eating chicken. (The Organic requirement for eggs is that they have a vegetarian diet, presumably from the industrial farming practice of feeding their dead chicken back to their live ones, which creates a closed loop system for disease. When in fact sometimes chickens DO eat other chickens, and mice, and bugs, and sometimes grains and seeds. They are vicious little omnivores like us and need a varied diet. So you can look all you want for the perfect egg at the store and finally settle on cage free organic, but you won’t get the egg with the most nutrients from the happiest chicken. Get your eggs at the farmers market and make sure to ask if their chicken eat bug. This way you know that they are out and about living their chicken lives and that the egg you get is optimal.)

Wisk the yolk and start dripping in olive oil- I start with about 3/4 cups. One yolk can really only take up 1 cup total. Starting with a slow thin stream and always incorporate all the oil before adding too much more, otherwise it will seperate. When it starts to get too thick to wisk (this cue is why I like doing it by hand) add some water. You will see the mixture immediately lighten up and get whiter.

Some lemon juice and salt can also be added. Also some whey, as it more than doubles the life of your hard-earned mayo. Actually there are endless possibilities of things to add flavor-wise. Garlic and herbs being ideal. Basil is outstanding!

                          

I started the process with some confusion. The recipe in Nourishing Traditions states: ” If you are using raw milk, place the milk in a clean glass container and allow it to stand at room temperature 1-4 days until it separates”. Now, to me there are two things that are unclear about these instructions. The first is whether or not the glass container should be covered if not sealed. I really could not find an acceptable answer searching the web, so I decided to screw a lit on the jar and see what happens. Because there were no explicit directions to keep the process from the air I often opened the lid to see and smell what was going on. The lid would get taught with pressure from the activity in the jar so I would release that, which I think was a good thing to do.

For the risks of playing around with bacteria activity in an non-sterile kitchen the lack of specificity in the instructions for this process is frustrating. But I decided to trust the fact that people have been doing this with milk for thousands of years, since I have such additional advances as hand-washing and flush toilets, I think I should be fine.

Here is the beginning of separation. But it being winter room temp was pretty low and the process was going slower than it seemed like it should. We also decided to move the jar to the top of the fridge where it is warmer. This move helped to move things along and after day four actual changes were happening. But I have to admit I was pretty unsure about the whole thing.
That brings up the second issue with the directions we weren’t sure what degree of separation we were looking for. Did we wait for the first signs or for distinct layers? I don’t know why recipes like this decide to error on the side of less information, it doesn’t seem conducive to the success of one’s instructions.

We decided to wait longer. (Or rather one of us did, and I decided to go along.)

We waited for something to happen that, it turns out,just doesn’t happen. You can see that there are three distinct parts, the cream on top, the liquid (whey) and the now solid-ish milk. But it doesn’t become three different layers one on top of the other like we imagined, in fact it doesn’t even have to get as far along as we let it. In fact I was pretty sure that this was too far. I opened it up to smell.

Up until now the stuff had had a sour aroma, but nothing bad-smelling, kind of a mix of Parmesan and yogurt. But then at this point it smelled stronger and off and I got worried. Plus I saw circles on top which looked suspect to me. So I gave up. On this batch anyway.

I went and bought a new half gallon of raw milk (this is not the part of the blog where I am saving money) and started over with the jar on top of the fridge. I decided to let it go just to the point where separation begins, not letting it get too far along. Four days later I saw some separation, smelled it and called it good. The milk is more solid, there is liquid and cream, but nothing has really changed places.

At this point it smelled a fresh sour (which apparently is not a contradiction) and very pleasing.

I dumped out the jar into my towel (I chose a pretty thin one) lined strainer. Immediately I could see that much more separation had happened than it looked from the outside. All the solid milk collected in the strainer and almost three cups of why poured out the bottom immediately. I put this in the fridge, while the remainder dripped out.

Without squeezing tie up the bag and let it drip.

The picture in Nourishing Traditions shows doing this over a tall wide-mouthed container, like a pitcher. I don’t have anything like this so I arranged this set up to get the necessary height and the width needed. For a while this dripped steadily. It can stay and drip almost all day. In fact it took a while for it to stop dripping entirely. Those last drips hang on and are slow to reform, but they are there and keep coming longer than my patience could handle.

I decided the drips were slow enough and far enough apart to open ‘er up.

The rest of the whey went in jars in the fridge to be used later (stay tuned!). And this beginning of cheese went in a glass container covered with plastic wrap.:

At this point you can do any number of things, though I don’t recommend eating as is. Just a reminder for those inspired to do this yourself. I started with whole raw milk. Not available in most states. You can make whey with yogurt but I don’t know how the cheese part come out. Or, start with pasteurized milk and culture it (this is instead of leaving it out to separate and culture on its own) or get it to curd with buttermilk or something acidic, linke vinegar. There are lots of resources for making cheese at home that is not raw and from milk that is homogenized.

Here is what I did with mine:

In a food processor with a couple squirts of flax oil and salt you can mix just about anything to make a raw, cultured and amazingly healthy cream cheese. If the flavor is a little ripe for you keep it in the fridge and let it mellow, my second batch was much calmer.

This one is smoked salmon and parsley. Spread on a sourdough bagel from the farmer’s market, I felt pretty legit.

                          

This is the tortilla soup from my oft used and recommended Alice Waters Cookbook “The Art of Simple Food.” We’ve been feeling the pull to be a bit more carnivorous the last few days- many vegan meals have come out of our kitchen recently for a number of reasons; meat and other animal products make meals more expensive and we just don’t buy cheap meat, we have been cutting back on dairy just for our general wellbeing, and its honestly felt rather unnecessary in terms of flavor, nourishment, and what we ask of animals/workers/land to go through for sources of protein. So we’ve really cut back more and more. But I’ve always appreciated having flexibility and variety as a part of my eating habits- so I made plans for something with chicken.

I had some pre-soaked black beans in the fridge so I decided to base my recipe search there. I’m trying to get into the habit of throwing a cup of beans in a bowl full of water as soon as I remember to, regardless of what I am thinking about cooking next. After 5 or 6 hours I drain and put the soaked beans in a Nancy’s yogurt container and keep it in the fridge until I come up with a use for them. That way the prospect of using my bulk dried beans doesn’t become such a time commitment right when I need to be getting a meal together and I’ve taken advantage of a dirt cheap protein source.

Far from dirt cheap, the chicken in this soup was the most expensive ingredient. Though the recipe only calls for one chicken breast,and this is precisely why soup is so cost effective. A whole organic free-range chicken breast (with bone and skin on) was a little over 6 bucks. Other uses of this might have required on breast per person, relying on the chicken as the center of the meal which would be way more than I would want to spend on one dinner. The soup lets you spread that 6 dollars over four or five meals. I think we had two dinners (that is dinner for two twice) and three lunches.

To the recipe we added bok choy from the garden and this was also a great way to use our giant and not so awesome (mealy) tomatoes.

best flavors: lime (not in recipe), chipotle chile, anahiem pepper

Last week’s soup (I am detecting a trend) was a testament to the thrifty potential of the combination of soup, a garden, and bulk dried beans. I can’t really come up with a per meal cost for this soup, it was so nominal. Only major cost was the chicken stock- $2.50 for one quart.

Squash and corn from the garden:

(sad garden note however, is that this is the only corn we got from garden- monocrops in the home garden are not easy)

So three cheers for soup, timely for our global economic collapse and just in time for fall! (At least for parts of the country who experiences cold in the fall, apparently this is when the East Bay finally gets summer)

                          

My reason for bringing this up isn’t about telling people donuts are unhealthy or criticizing people for drinking arguably shitty coffee. It’s that Dunkin Donuts (and all fast food, Starbucks, Mcdonalds, etc.) contributes to the problems Ms. Ray’s nonprofit is explicitly trying to address- that almost a third of American children are obese because sugary salty processed fast food is more accessible to children than healthy food or home cooked meals.

 (a picture of health, esp. that Styrofoam cup)

People eat there and that’s fine to an extent- but what really frustrates me is that we are supposed to reserve criticism for these places and their patrons because they are more affordable than healthy food. So we should support fast food because it feeds the poor? This is unacceptable right? Can we take a step back and see the ways in which these places contribute to the problem of access rather than being the only viable solution to feeding low-income families? How much does Dunkin Donuts pay their workers? Do they have reasonable pay and hours in order to provide home cooked meals for their families? Does any of the money spend at Dunkin Donuts stay in the community in which its located? Do any rural farm families profit from the eggs or wheat sales? Likely no, for any chain.

They may have a 300 calorie sandwich but they are not making any real difference in issue that 1 in 5 kids in the US face food insecurity (from Ray’s site) and almost a third are obese (how these overlap is another matter).

People are so quick to defend these products for the “regular, everyday folks who keep America running”, but they fail to see the ways in which the profits from these products contribute to the larger problems our communities face. It’s important not to be too idealogical about your own or other’s food choices, but when it comes down to the ways in which these choices impact us generally- e.g. the annual cost to society for obesity is estimated at nearly $100 billion, who pays for the landfills for all those styrofoam cups, do workers at these places rely on public programs for health care- then I think we have a right to look at the bigger picture and get a little nitpicky with those who have an audience and money to make a difference.

                          

I sliced them up, dipped the small slices in milk then patted them in half flour half corn meal with salt and pepper mixed in. Fried in olive oil, took maybe a minute.

They were so good there was no chance to photograph the result. This is to encourage you to try these for yourself.

                          

An emerging lesson on things like bread, pizza dough, and homemade pasta is that is takes half as long to make twice as much. I didn’t do this here, but if I had, it would have cheap, fast(er), and delicious.

                          

 (note the eggs should actually be beaten before going in, but I took artistic license)

Making pasta, I have now learned is not hard at all. It’s not convenient or fast, but it certainly isn’t hard. But guess what else it is? Cheap! Yes. Homemade pasta from local organic flour and local organic cage free eggs is cheaper than organic dried pasta from italy or who knows where.

It breaks down like this: Eggs are ¢21 a piece. The super nice local flour feels like a lot at $12 for a 7lb bag, but it comes down to ¢51 per cup. One batch of pasta can be made with 1 egg and 1 c flour. Try buying delicious fresh pasta for ¢72

Toothsome eh?

Note on the shrimp and any previous or future meals with beautiful seafood. A main purpose of the Goods are Odd is about living Mind to Mouth. This is about using your gray matter to come up with rational and creative solutions to the problem of health and healthy food being seemingly limited to those with significant income. Rational and creative sometimes includes luck. Everyone seems to have their lucky hook-ups in one part of life or another. A lot of times in communal settings there is a good deal of sharing because no one has much except what they can offer through their job or family or other hobbies. Ours happens to be a hook up with delicious, fresh, sustainable fish. Are you reaching out to those around you and sharing the hook-ups you have in possible return for others? This requires talking to and connecting with your neighbors and co-workers, or potential friends on the internet and often being the first to be generous.

                          

With already a couple batches made, I wanted to change things up. Not just with the veggies involved, which I did, but with the overall texture. The last time we ended with with sort of savory pancakes, with a thick batter

They were tasty but they just didn’t take us the way a fritter can. The were doughy, when they should be mostly veggies, almost juicy, fried up crispy.

To make this latest batch I decided to take out the flour and add much more pink. Specifically I had about seven small beets that were lovely looking a few weeks previous when gotten at the farmer’s market. But as always with beets, I just never got around to using them. My neighbor and I were talking about this love of the beet flavor but the lack of inclination to actually get the kitchen stained magenta and do something with them. Now that I had let them get a bit deflated I thought fritters might be the motivating medium.

I came across this nice blog and she had a very similar issue and solution. Her recipe also solved the heavy batter problem, only using about 1 tablespoon of flour for every cup of veggie hash and 1 egg for every two cups. I also used this recipe which had similar proportions. Knowing that I will have different amounts of veggies every time this was a good ratio to have in mind.

I actually ended up with about three cups beets and three cups zuc and used just a touch more flour because I was impatient with the drying out process.

With zucs from the garden and the market beets this made for a cheap and delicious four servings. I saved half the batter for another dinner.

The resulting batter was hardly batter at all, but I would say something closer to hashbrowns. Yum.

They are so meaty and bright they almost look like hamburger

Served up with the evening’s other project of basil pesto

One other change for me in this process was using olive oil to fry. I have been educated by friends on the ways in which my high-heat canola oil might not be consistent with my overall value and health standards for food. I tried to defend it with the issue of olive oil’s low smoking point. But in the interest of adapting to new information I tried to see if I could fry with enough heat that wouldn’t make the olive oil smoke. I heated the pan, then added the oil and worked quickly. For the first time I didn’t let the pan get too hot and all the fritters fried up well.

It’s difficult to get the middle of the fritter fully ‘done’- they certainly don’t get crispy through and through. I’m not sure they need to. With the less doughy batter I had better results as I sometimes felt like I was eating raw batter- but this time I just got a crispy crust and a juicy middle, which I can live with.