"The Revolution Will Be Home-Baked" Soaked Bread - - Pilgrims with iPhones - - and other musings

Bread is simple, right? Wheat and water - the staff of life... you go to the store, buy a loaf, take it home and devour it with an infinite variety of toppings and applications. Bread is awesome.

The beautiful simplicity of bread must not be confused with the apparent ease with which it is commercially mass produced. Let's face it, folks, we have absolutely taken the loveliness of bread and sacrificed it upon the heathen altar of industrialization.

**Industrialization - good for things like indoor plumbing and penicillin, bad for things like food.**

Our ancestors would have taken our daily bread and stared at it in wonder and dismay.
What are you supposed to do with it? Build things? Wear it? Throw it at your enemies?

People are always musing on the idea of Pilgrims with iPhones and how funny that would be - I think Pilgrims would be much more interested in the plethora of non-food-foods we consume without a thought, just because someone put it on a shelf and told us it was to eat.

"Forget that little magic box, my dear, what on earth is that which you putteth in thy mouth???"

**Pilgrims - probably didn't talk like that.**

Bread is simple - but we have abused its simplicity and turned it into an unrecognizable nonfood our founding fathers would have refused to feed their livestock.  I think it's safe to say that if they had eaten what we eat, we wouldn't be here today to eat what we're eating. How long can a civilization survive on nonfood? I guess we're going to find out.

**Steps down off soapbox and returns it the laundry room.**

There was a wisdom that these ancestors of ours possessed that we are lacking. A knowing. A rightness that worked with what God had naturally given them.

Before frankenfood and Wonderbread, there was sourdough. There was flat bread. There were community mills and genetically pure grain. It seemed like necessity and a lack of technology forced this wisdom on them - and maybe it did - but it worked. It had to work, because if it didn't there wasn't any Walmart up the street selling fake bread for $.99 a loaf. It worked and in many instances it worked better than what we have now.

It's simple because you can take the seed of a grass, some water and tiny, funky little creatures that live in the air we breathe and end up with BREAD. Bread, which sustained life for thousands of years. And people question the existence of God... when there's bread??

I love it. I love the science and the process and the endless possibilities it adds to my daily life. I want to honor the Old Ways while not being afraid to use some of the new ones too (thank you, refrigerator, oven and KitchenAid mixer!)

I've found that The Old Ways can be summed up with 3 S's:
Soaked
Sprouted and
Soured

The Ancients would either sprout their grain and then dry it before grinding it to flour and using it for bread, use a sourdough starter to leaven their bread or supposedly (this is a new one for me) soak their flour in an acidic medium before baking. I'm not pretending to be an expert in this, I read mostly before I go to bed which means I am deliriously tired and bleary-eyed. I absorb enough to make it work and make a mental note to go back and get sciency with it later.

Why all this trouble? Phytic Acid. It's something in wheat that makes it hard to digest. Yuppers.
And then there is the fact that commercially produced yeast wasn't available as leavening, and refrigerators weren't available to keep things from spoiling - neither was the cocktail of chemical preservatives, softeners and conditioners.
Food had to be tough (in a good, 'I can handle this' sort of way). And as it is with a lot of things in this life, sometimes a little *good* toughness does us a whole lot of good.

Preparing bread The Old Way pretty effectively solved these problems. It was easier to digest, lasted longer and was satisfying to eat.

**I am a Pilgrim, and I approve of this bread.**

I'm working my way up to a no-yeast sourdough bread (and variations) for us for every day and the next step was trying a soaked bread where the flour was mixed with water and an acidic medium (I used whey) and then left to culture for 15 hours before preparing.  HERE is the recipe and method I used. I did NOT use the ascorbic acid, simply because I don't have any - - - and it turned out just fine.

This recipe uses yeast (and she explains all about that in her article) but it seemed to be as easy to digest as the bread I've been making - and it took One day instead of Six. It was also nice to have a not sour wheat bread instead of a white sourdough for a change. This is definitely an excellent sandwich loaf I will make again!!  Let me know what you think...

The soaking 

The rising 

The cooling (after baking)

The consuming

Sing a Song of Sourdough: Part One

Ok - get ready for pictures and links and every wild and wonderful thing concerning my recent obsession with Sourdough. I'll try not to run-on, stop me if I do.
Let me begin with this - the original recipe for a super easy 'compromise sourdough'. It's what I've been experimenting with because I'm too big a chicken to dive in and just go yeast-less all at once.
Baby steps, Baby steps.
So you can start this little pictorial journey by reading Gwen's recipe and technique for fridge-fermented, low carb bread HERE>> or you can scroll on and come back to it later... totally up to you.

This here is my first try using Gwen's recipe. I forgot my baby step mantra and dumped in my homemade, sprouted grain flour, which can be tricky - especially since sprouting the grain dissolves a lot of the gluten - which is what gives bread its nice bread-like texture. I let it sit in the fridge for 5 days total. Since the four was very dark and fragrant, the bread turned out dark and fragrant and had a very pronounced toasted grain flavor. I also didn't add nearly enough salt, so it also tasted flat. It goes in the Brick Bread Category. There was no buoyancy, no crumb, just dense-dense-dense. It was pretty good toasted with butter and apple butter... 

Meet Take Two, which came out looking and tasting like Bread. I used half home-ground whole wheat and half King Arthur all-purpose white flour and it was an overwhelming success. This dough waited for 6 days before I baked it up and it made two gorgeous loaves. It had an interesting texture, very much like a baguette, but it was finely grained which made it good for toast and sandwiches. We really enjoyed this batch and I found that after eating it I didn't have the usual severe bloating that normally follows my consumption of any sort of bread. Yay!!

I made this loaf yesterday morning. It had the same flour mix and the same 6 day waiting period the last batch did. I decided to try a trick I'd read where you put your loaf in a cold oven and then turn it on, letting the bread rise and bake all in one easy step. Well. My loaf rose and tried to leave and then made this creepy franken-baby-loaf on top that adhered itself to the pan and had to be pried off with a butter knife. Lesson learned. I shall let my bread rise *before* baking. 

Notice the raw honey sitting behind it? A favorite snack at our house is buttered toast with honey - it's so delicious and the raw honey contains enzymes that help to break down the bread even more. The honey has to be really raw though - and this stuff is! I found it at the discount food store for a remarkable price (nearly 95% off the retail amount) and it's really raw - so raw it has little bee pieces and comb bits on top. Ewww - but authentic.

The other half of the dough I used for flatbread for dinner last night. It was excellent- I couldn't have been more thrilled. I baked it on my stoneware pan and we were all amazed at how it didn't make us 'feel fat' afterward, even though it was bread and cheese...  

(If anyone is curious, I topped the dough with organic olive oil, crushed garlic, Italian herbs, salt, parmesan cheese and slices of mozzarella. Baked in a 500 degree oven **the stone was pre-heated** for 7 or 8 minutes and served in strips with seasoned tomato sauce for dipping.) 

And here is a picture of my stoneware baking sheet. Because it's really neat and deserves a little spotlight. I was given this as a wedding gift from some very dear friends!! 

Alrighty then - this has been the first hundred yards in my trek towards traditional bread making. During the next leg of the trail we will encounter such wonders as wild-caught yeasts, home-ground wheat flours, grain mills, sourdough mothers and stoneware bowls...
Until then, eat healthy, live hearty,
Mrs.

UnPaleo-fy Me

I've recently become obsessed with sourdough bread.

It started as most things start, as a problem needing to be solved. 

We have pretty clean diets, but with pregnancy #2 sapping most of my energy, I had returned to buying our bread at the grocery store. The convenience pleased me but every time I opened the bag to get a slice I felt a sting of conviction. It doesn't help that the Paleo diet and its various stepchildren are ALL the rage - everywhere one looks we are encouraged to forsake wheat and use a plethora of odd, flour-like substitutes to make 'sugar-free-grain-free-egg-free-dairy-free, paleo-friendly' everything. 

I do understand their point. 

I appreciate their science and their concern. 

But I have a bit of a problem with rejecting so many things that have kept civilization going for, well, as long as civilization has gone on. How can milk and honey be bad when God promised His people a land flowing with it?
And why would Jesus call Himself the Bread of Life if bread is synonymous with poison? 

Firstly, I understand that these pictures are, indeed, pictures. Secondly, I believe the milk God uses so promisingly in His word was not the glorified glue-water we buy today in plastic gallon jugs, nor was the bread Christ ate commercially created using Frankenstein grain and synthetic chemicals. 

So maybe my problem isn't with the Paleo people. They're dealing with the problem (which is the increasing toxicity of our food and its detrimental effects on our health) one way - by avoiding the tainted foods all together. 

I - being the stubborn mortal that I am- need another option because I will never be paleo-fied.
I want an alternate route. 

I think I found it. 

It's a pretty fine blend of a hundred different people's wisdom - standing on the shoulders of giants as it were - mixed with my own ideas and conclusions and pet theories such as my Ma Ingalls test.  Ma Ingalls didn't have coconut oil, papaya enzymes or stevia... So how on earth did she stay in good health? That's what I want to learn - how to be traditionally healthy without depending on the internet, fancy foreign foods or highly processed health serums. 

Beside considering Ma Ingalls and Mother Wilder, I've read a lot of Weston A. Price's studies as well as many other people's thoughts and findings based on WAP's writings. 

This is going to be my online journal of sorts, chronicling my journey towards a more traditional, unfancy type diet and in turn, lifestyle - because what is food but fuel for life itself? 

Some topics I want to explore are:

Traditionally Fermented Breads (we're going yeast-free, folks!!) 

Sourdough and Biblical leavening 

Traditional North American (local) Fats

Cultured and Fermented Fruits and Veggies 

Raw and Cultured Dairy 

Traditional and Local Sweeteners 

Natural, Traditional Housekeeping 

So there you have it! 

Stay tuned for my many wild and wonderful sourdough bread experiments... 

Peace,

Mrs.  

My first loaf of sourdough, which could have been used as a brick... or doorstop... or weapon. It gets better- don't worry.