#7 – Sourdough
“That led to bakers yeast, which was a household item by 1900… Then we just seem to have gone completely downhill from there, to this place where on the shelves are these loaves made in a process that, if you showed a baker from three or four hundred years ago, they just wouldn’t recognize, with all these additives in it… And people just think that’s bread.” – Alison, in Episode 7, Sourdough
“You basically need to be able to stir a spoon in a bowl. That’s about the skill level that’s needed.” – Andrea
Mentioned in the podcast:
“There’s about 18 million ways to do this, it can’t be that hard.” – Andrea
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog – Bread: Part I
The History of Food Podcast on Apple
Sourdough Recipes on Alison’s blog, Ancestral Kitchen
“Spelt has a tendency to go stale quite quickly, also the crumb can be a bit hard; and the scald helps with both those things.” Alison
Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz
The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz
Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day by Peter Reinhart
“Each thing along the line has grabbed me and pulled me in more. Each step I’ve taken away from that 9 to 5 life slowly slowly slowly to intentionally build something else had rewarded me in ways that tell I’m on the right path. This feels in accordance with my nature far more than what I used to do and how I used to live.” – Alison
Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon Morell
Bread flour sourced from Azure Standard
EInkorn flour sourced from Young Living
“If we could just awaken everybody to the idea that their food is playing a role — I don’t have to tell you to make sourdough or how to make sourdough once you have the idea that food is affecting everything about your life you will begin to seek out and the things will come to you.” – Andrea
Tara Couture of Slow Down Farmstead
“I took my own journey and proved them wrong. Once you get a little taste of that, once you see what’s possible, then you just can’t stop.” – Alison
Alison can be found at instagram.com/ancestral_kitchen
Andrea can be found at instagram.com/farmandhearth
We can both be found at instagram.com/ancestralkitchenpodcast
Thank you for listening, reviewing and commenting!!!
Transcript:
Andrea:
Welcome to the Ancestral Kitchen Podcast with Allison, a European town dweller in central Italy, and Andrea living on a newly created family farm in Northwest Washington State, USA. Pull up a chair at the table and join us as we talk about eating, cooking, and living with ancient ancestral food wisdom in a modern world kitchen.
Music:
Music
Alison:
Welcome back to the ancestral kitchen podcast hello andrea hello.
Andrea:
Allison i’m so happy to be here with you
Alison:
And me too and and this is a particularly um interesting episode for me because we are going to be talking about sourdough which anyone who follows me on instagram knows that quite a lot of my posts are sourdough so I’m excited to dive into this topic with you this morning. This is just your thing.
Andrea:
It totally is.
Alison:
Exactly, it’s been my thing for a couple of years now and I’ve still got much to learn so we’ll see what comes up today. We started a little bit earlier today for me but I have had my breakfast so in our usual starting mode and in a sourdough kind of styley, I shall share that I had a sourdough pancake for breakfast, which was yummy. I used spelt and I put a little bit of chestnut flour in. Chestnuts are everywhere in Tuscany, local and fresh and absolutely delicious. And the flour is sweet, but works really well when you mix it with something kind of nutty like spelt so I cooked one of those up in some lard that we rendered and my favorite pancake topping it’s kind of I’m I’m easily pleased with pancakes just having a pancake in itself is enough but I like to put um miso and ground linseed and olive oil on my pancakes. So that’s what I had this morning and it was crunchy and delicious and just lovely lovely.
Andrea:
I love that.
Alison:
So I’m suitably sated.
Andrea:
Now you definitely tend towards the savory toppings and you’ve said that before that you don’t prefer to have as much sweet and is that because you said that you basically overdosed on sweets for so long?
Alison:
Yeah, I’ve got an interesting kind of situation with sweet in my life in that because I was, when I was younger, I was overweight. I did that really by going mad on sweet things. I used to eat chocolate in kilogram bars and cakes and biscuits and just sugar in its neat form as well. And that led me to a place, as I’ve described in one of the earlier podcasts, where when I was 20, I was twice the weight that I am now. Right um and I and I’ve lost the weight a long time ago and maintained it I lost 140 pounds but my biome at that early stage of my life I think was affected to a point where it’s it’s completely different to what it would have been if I had not had that relationship with sugar.
Alison:
And what I found out over the last probably five or six or seven years is that when I consume sugar really in any form including fruit um when i have my um cycle i get vertigo and through trial and error and going months without having any sugar at all the vertigo just stopped and anyone who’s had vertigo knows it’s absolutely debilitating it’s just horrible and so i’d rather not have the vertigo than have the sugar um i’m hoping that as i slowly build up my probiotics and over many years affect my biome through what i’m doing with um slowly increasing sauerkraut slowly increasing other probiotics that as i move on in my life that situation will change and i will be able to introduce some fruit because i do miss fruit a bit but at the moment and it’s interesting because taste buds are so.
Alison:
Easily influenced once you stop something your taste buds do adjust and you start I mean I find I’ve started to taste sweet in many many other things that I never tasted sweet in before this happened so I I do get sweet pleasure from some other foods that perhaps other people wouldn’t consider sweet like for instance the chestnut flour but really with chestnut flour I only I’ll have a spoonful of that so rarely so it was a real treat for me this morning um but I don’t I feel like I’m doing something positive for my health and I understand it’s you know because of my particular kind of set of things that happened to me as a kid and I find it amazing that that you know that was 25 years ago and yet still my biome is been shaped and is living every day the effects of what happened to me back then it’s amazing that does.
Andrea:
Not fit with our modern obsession with fast you know this is in seven days or you know if i take this pill will i be fixed tomorrow you know that that’s a concept outside of our um you know microwave society kind of perception of things
Alison:
You’re right and it takes some it’s taken me some getting used to you know the fact that, about I think three years ago I said right okay I need to slowly increase my sauerkraut I’m not doing very well when I have loads of it I couldn’t sleep so I started from literally half a gram and then slowly slowly slowly slowly I’ve built up to 26 grams of sauerkraut but to give me the kind of mindset to think that that was something that I was going to do and it might take years and years and years it’s it’s taken a shift in the kind of cultural ideas that i have like you said around things should happen quickly things can happen quickly because i think in the biome although you can affect your biome definitely by having probiotics very quickly to make real lasting change takes a long time it does it’s.
Andrea:
Kind of sad though how fast we can destroy it that doesn’t seem to take any time at all why oh
Alison:
Dear so tell us about your supper this evening what what have you eaten okay.
Andrea:
So tonight was actually wonderful always dinner is wonderful i have to say but um tonight was the the perfect night to make me look really good on the podcast because we’re on day two of a hog slaughter. And so processing the hog. And one thing that we have learned with butchering is it’s fun to just take out whatever cut you want, you know, some exorbitant cut. It doesn’t matter. And be like, this is our dinner.
Andrea:
Anything you want. So Gary, my husband, cut out some steaks from the pig and he cut out one piece of mussel that’s two, well, it’s two mussels actually, I think, but it’s called the Denver cut and the copa and you can separate them, but he kept them together. Then he like, he rolled it up, he tied it with string and he marinated it for a couple hours this afternoon. But it was, it was kind of a fun, yeah, I think he used garlic and I don’t remember what he used, just two or three things. But anyways, I thought to myself, this is a good example of how a real food dinner can be really, really fast. Because he did marinate that Denver and Copa piece, but he also made the sirloin steak cuts from the shoulder. And there’s plenty of both, you know, we didn’t really need both, but we just, we made them both anyways.
Andrea:
And, um, he said we were working on the sausage, plowing away through everything. And then he goes, okay, well, we, we should probably stop and eat dinner. So he stopped, he took the food out to the grill. I went in the kitchen and made biscuits. And in 20 minutes, we were sitting down at the table with these grilled steaks, you know, pretty decadent for us to just have a huge piece of meat. We usually don’t just have like a piece of meat. We usually have meat in things. So this felt really fun. And then I made speedy biscuits, the evil non-soaked biscuits using just raw cream and bread flour. And, um, then we had fermented mustard and sauerkraut. We had applesauce and honey, apple jelly and butter. And it just, I don’t know, I was sitting there and we always say a blessing before food and I could just feel my mouth just watering. I was so hungry.
Alison:
I think mine’s watching that.
Andrea:
It all looks so good. You know, there’s the salt and the fat right on the plate in front of you. And, and, um, I definitely would say that butchering and home butchering and, um, traditional or ancestral nose to tail preparation is so different from the supermarket cuts. I don’t even think I would know how to cook meat from the grocery store because it’s so easy to cook meat from these phenomenal animals you do nothing to it and everybody goes this is literally the best you know pork beef whatever I’ve ever had what did you do and you say well I honestly didn’t do anything but the farmer for the past two years has been feeding this animal the best of the best, the top of the line, and it shows up in the meat and everybody appreciates it on the plate, but then they’re surprised and they, and then when you say that the meat matters, I’m surprised how many people say, well, I mean, you know, they don’t believe me, but, but it really does. It really does.
Alison:
So, and so simple like that, just to marinate it. As I, as I listened to you talking, I, I can imagine kind of the two of you working together, The actual home, you know, as a unit, we have a similar relationship, me and Rob here, in that we kind of complement each other. And after years of working together, we’ve learned, you know, how to read each other’s signals and one does one thing, one does another thing. And it just sounded really like you and Gary were working together in kind of a harmony there to bring together a dinner for you all really, really easily.
Andrea:
I really appreciate that you mentioned that. And actually, that’ll transition us into our discussion on sourdough nicely. But because that is my favorite thing, and I actually posted on my Instagram stories today, I was kind of joking, but I said, you know, it was a picture or a video or whatever of me and Gary tying up bags of paper packs of sausage meat. And I said, hashtag farm dates, hashtag normalize farm dates. Because I don’t know, for me, it feels just very romantic working with the person that I love and doing this project together to take care of our family and feed our children and feed our parents and just plan for the future. And we talk about the future. So, but that definitely will pop up in our conversation about sourdough today, especially when we go into the history a little bit.
Alison:
Yeah, I totally agree with you. I feel that around bread, certainly. Yes. All the other things I do in the kitchen with my husband, Rob. But we are often, our family is brought together by the things we do, grinding the grain or we’re mixing bread. or we’re making this week we’ve been making beer as well and using the mash to make bread and it’s something that we all do together and it, Every time we do it, it’s like it creates a new kind of bond between us, another sort of a tie. And it brings us together and makes us something about the food that you put on the table. If you’ve all put something into it, you feel bonded by it for sure.
Andrea:
Yes, absolutely. So take us there.
Alison:
So let’s talk about bread. Let’s talk about bread. So I’ve got quite a lot of areas of sourdough to talk about. The first thing I wanted to do was just to try and define what sourdough is. And I looked up various definitions and I didn’t really like them. So I tried to think about what sourdough means to me. And so for me, sourdough is a bread product that is completely risen by wild yeasts and bacteria. And those wild yeast and bacteria work over a long time frame. And they produce lactic acid acetic acid and gases that rise your bread and the bread is healthier it’s more natural it keeps better and it has much more flavor than alternative breads oh yeah how do you feel about that definition do you want to add anything to it.
Andrea:
Well i mean there’s all the science behind it but i just think sourdough tastes better it just
Alison:
Does yeah i agree i agree with you so first of all i wanted to kind of say well how how was bread made in our history because really sourdough is although it’s very fashionable it’s not a new phenomenon because generally all bread used to be made like this until really very very recently um for absolute millennium there was no commercial yeast available there was no commercially baked breads like there are today um and so those yeasts to make bread would have been made literally from what was around you captured wild yeasts there were references in texts from thousands of years ago and then, as society’s moved on i know in the 1700s in england people who made bread used to go and get yeast from beer balm using yeast that were kind of available and around them and we i think it’s easy to look at breads in the supermarket that one might see these days and think that’s what bread is but bread really for 95 of our history maybe even more has been sourdough yep.
Andrea:
Yep.
Alison:
You’ve been doing some reading on the history, haven’t you? Tell us a bit about what you’ve uncovered. Yeah.
Andrea:
So my sister turned me on to this podcast called The History of Food.
Alison:
So that’s a good podcast.
Andrea:
If you can’t listen to enough about food, there’s more for you. So he referenced in episode 27, which if you want to hear about the history of bread in Breve, go to that episode number 27. Kevin, it’s an hour and 24 minutes. So that might not sound very brief, but I mean, he’s trying to cover all of human history. So, but he refers multiple times to this blog, which I had to go and find. And it’s called A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. And it’s acoup.blog blog online or just look up, I just Googled it, a collection of unmitigated pedantry. And he has a five-part series about bread. How did they make it? And it is so fascinating because we either don’t eat bread because of, you know, their dietary choices or dietary restrictions,
Andrea:
Or we just don’t like it or we, we do eat it, we just go to the store and we stand in front of shelves with monetary exchange rates listed there. And we choose a plastic bag with the picture on it that most appeals to us or an advertisement on the side that most appeals to us. And we go home and that’s our bread.
Andrea:
Bread has pretty much been the foundation of society for quite a long time. It’s been something that people’s entire existence rises and falls on. So if you have ever read the Bible, then there’s tons of, there’s just so many literary references to bread in there. Like, give us this day our daily bread, you know, when the devil tells Jesus to turn stones into bread or, you know, all the way back to, you know, ancient Egypt where the, you know, Hebrews are making their unleavened bread for Passover and things like that. So it’s just something that is woven throughout all of our history. And as for why, well, what you just said about sourdough is kind of why. It’s a really simple, nutritious food that you can make. And I think we have a idea that it’s complicated either because
Andrea:
We’ve been told so many skills are too hard for us and it’s better to leave it to people who are professionals at it and this goes for everything from teaching your kid how to read to making bone broth, you know? But I think with sourdough, what I would say is it’s been done It’s a simple task that humans have been doing for thousands of years. And it’s not hard. It’s just different.
Alison:
Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to pick up on what you, two words you used to describe bread. You said simple and nutritious. And I wanted to contrast that with the bread that is sold on most of the shelves in the UK, my home country. So in the UK in the early 1960s there was a method called the Chorley Wood method brought in for bread and now 80% of the bread on UK shelves is made using this method and it was so popular because it made it much much much cheaper to make bread it made the bread softer and it doubled the shelf life of it and what happens in this process is just kind of abominable to me oh no the the standard ingredients of bread are there and then extra hard fats are added extra yeast is added extra chemicals are added and then the bread is whipped in massive machines the dough is whipped um to make the loaves in a absolute fraction of the time that it would take a normal person to make a yeasted loaf let alone a sourdough loaf and then it’s sliced packaged in plastic and sent to the supermarket and i think you know comparing that to the simple and nutritious words that you use to describe bread it’s like the other end of the spectrum it’s now and that.
Andrea:
It’s it’s now it’s a chemical production
Alison:
It’s a production line and and as with so many of the other things we we’ve talked about and we will talk about you know it started with the industrial revolution requiring this quick large consistent scalable product and because of the discoveries of louis pasteur and the fact that yeasts were alive and his ability to to kind of heat properties to pasteurize them and then inoculate things that kind of led to there being a baker’s yeast which in my research by the 1900s was a was a household item in England and then we just seem to have gone completely downhill from there to this place where on the shelves in in the UK are these loaves made in a process that if you showed a baker from three or four hundred years ago they just wouldn’t recognize with all these additives in that you don’t know what they’re called when you look at the label and people just think that’s bread.
Andrea:
Well, I think one of the ways that we get away with this in manufacture is because we’re generation by generation removed farther and farther from the memory of bread. Yeah. So when people want to make bread at home, Bizarrely enough, they are now trying to recreate the grocery store bread, and they’re shocked when spelt sourdough doesn’t puff up and fluff up and turn into a sponge the way, you know, nutritionally stripped, denuded, wheat-like products do when they’re combined with chemicals. And, um, that I think is, that’s theft, you know, to steal the memory one, just one generation at a time. And then, um, you know, we’re left with all we know is the spongy sliced bread in the store.
Alison:
I think what you’re saying is, is true. There’s a kind of a psychological term for it. I think maybe we’ve talked about it before where it’s a new norm for each generation has a new norm because it’s what they’re used to and what they’ve grown up with and then because they don’t have that previous memory and you.
Andrea:
Can go a little bit
Alison:
Farther it seems like it’s normal to them yeah yeah exactly exactly with.
Andrea:
Less with less less uh disruption people would really fight if you tried to do this you know even 100 years ago but now it’s not so hard
Alison:
Yeah so it’s just slipping away let’s talk about the health benefits because you know we’ve kind have said how it was normal right and how it was part of the daily household but there are incredible health benefits to slow fermented sourdough bread and on both sides of the coin that’s part of the reason why so many people have problems with store-bought bread because the grain is not processed in the same way so regarding that the health benefits that that i know of first of all the the grain itself is pre-digested in the sourdough process so that means there’s less work for our bodies to do to get the nutrients from that grain and digestion is one of the most energy um most high energy tasks of the body so anything we can do to make that easier allows other energy to be freed up to carry on healing us and do better things in our body i know that sourdough is lower on the gi index than normal bread because the sugars are metabolized in the process so anyone who has any blood sugar issues would find sourdough better for them than standard bread and regards gut health even though you’re cooking the.
Alison:
Probiotics that are in the starter there are postbiotics and paraprobiotics in that cooked material which are going in and changing the layout the territory in your gut biome for the better.
Alison:
During the fermentation process, the anti-nutrients in the grain, the phytates and the lectins are broken down and there are more bioavailable nutrients in the bread because of the fermentation process. And in addition, the process alters the proteins in the bread. So for the example of a wheat or a spelt, it alters the gluten. And I know that kind of first hand here because when I met my husband 10 years ago he couldn’t eat wheat at all he had unbelievable problems with it and in over the last 10 years he’s moved to a space where although I cook spelt most of the time in our house he can he can eat my spelt absolutely fine but he can also occasionally eat sourdough wheat without issues and that’s incredible considering the state he was in when I met him and I think there are a lot of things involved in that but the fact that sourdough that we make here now alters the gluten in the grain is a large kind of chunk in why that’s happened to him so that’s kind of a huge list of the health benefits that if you eat sourdough regularly you’re going to get which are just not there in store-bought bread that’s been fermented in a few hours and whipped up.
Andrea:
It’s an anti-nutrient it you know you you don’t even have the portions of the wheat that make the wheat safe for you to ingest in those store-bought breads so you’re now putting yourself at risk just by eating them which is mind-boggling
Alison:
There was a big um kind of um exposure campaign i would say about a couple of years ago in europe about shop-bought sourdough because a lot of the baking companies were jumping on the sourdough trend and producing loaves that had pretty kind of packaging and looked artisanal and calling them sourdough and then if you look at the labels you see they’ve actually got baker’s yeast in and they had perhaps a vinegar put in to give that acetic acid flavor and so I wanted to mention here that you know if you don’t have, at this moment the skills or if in a moment when you’re having a busy week you think I’d buy a sourdough do look at the labels of the sourdoughs that you see you know if you buy it from a baker it’s more likely that it’s going to be properly processed but from a supermarket I wouldn’t trust seeing the the label sourdough on a supermarket shelf so do look at the labels and make sure if you if you’re buying sourdough that it that it actually is a soured dough right i don’t know if that’s the same in the u.s whether that’s kind of happened there.
Andrea:
We have so many labeling scandals it’s it’s worthless to even try to keep up with it you literally can’t trust anything and one thing you’ll notice on breads here is it will say this huge blaring advertisement on the side made with whole wheat and people think oh all right that’s you know that’s the real deal So, but if you look on the back, number one ingredient, bleached flour, and then there is some whole wheat in it. See, it was made with whole wheat. Whole wheat was in it.
Alison:
2%.
Andrea:
Yeah, 2%. Just enough to get on the label. So it’s disappointing. And I think that’s part of why my frustration tends to compel me to make things at home. And I do acknowledge and I want to make sure that I acknowledge the moms who are listening, who are just exhausted and overwhelmed and think to themselves, okay, so great. I can’t make the spread for my family, so I’m a bad mom. No, you’re not. You’re not a bad mom. And I think probably all of us have, as Allison was just saying, you know, that week where you’re just, I don’t know, just worn out, you know. So yeah i i just don’t want somebody to think that i that i that i would criticize or judge them for not doing it but definitely read those labels before you buy something because it’s
Alison:
It’s a nice thing to support a local baker sometimes if they’re if they’re doing a good thing and trying to compete against a supermarket you know it’s a nice thing to to go out and taste someone else’s bread as well is there anything you want to add to the health benefits before we move on to something more practical.
Andrea:
No, I just wanted to say that I loved when you said that it had the para and postbiotics because my favorite lunch is a pint jar of garlic, kimchi or kraut and, you know, a chunk of sourdough and a bunch of butter and just like soak up all the liquid out of that jar onto the bread. And now I’m thinking, okay, that’s why I like it because It’s the full meal deal for my gut.
Alison:
That is wonderful. You know, bread is just a blessing because it does that soaking up. It does. It’s a thing here in Italy. There’s a term which I think is called fare la scapetta. Oh, wow. And it means basically using the end of bread to push around your plate when you finish your dinner and soak up all the bits. Because that’s an important thing for bread to be able to do, of course.
Andrea:
We who wash the dishes, thank you.
Alison:
Yeah no that’s that’s okay let’s talk about practical things now I’ve started my I started my sourdough journey about a year before we left England so that was perhaps three years ago and I was just in my house in Penzance and I got some books from the library um but I wanted to share the the main resource that I used at that time because I think as a beginning sourdough baker um it’s it’s tough to to know where to go to know who to follow everyone’s got different routines everyone’s got different ideas everyone builds their starter differently and what happened with me was I was there in the southwest of England and I wanted to use local flour so I was like no I’m not having any Canadian flour I’m not having any of this imported flour I know that the UK flour is low protein but I’m going to use it anyway and I wanted to be completely 100% whole whole grain so I set myself a ridiculous task I mean I’d never cooked I’d never baked sourdough ever and I suddenly wanted to use the UK flour completely 100% whole grain and what happened was I went online and I rather than finding an individual person’s site I found a site called thefreshloaf.com.
Alison:
And it’s a collection of forums, bread forums, which are extremely active.
Alison:
And you can be a novice or you can be an expert. There’s some professional bakers on there. And there are people who’ve been on there literally like 15 years giving advice to others. And so I read and I read and I read on that forum because all of the posts from years and years and years are there. And I started to post my bakes pictures asking questions and I found a mentor a guy who lives in London who kind of took me on and we started emailing and he had much more experience than me and he helped me through working with at that time as a particular English spelt that was very low in protein that I just couldn’t get to rise and we had a relationship for maybe six or seven months emailing sharing recipes sharing what we’d done and he he literally mentored me um from that site and i and i still use the site today when i have problems i had a problem with my grain grinder a couple of months ago and i posted a message about that and it’s so helpful so many different opinions and it’s just it’s a free resource you know you don’t need to go and buy the book or go out to the library and try and get books it’s just there at your fingertips and so i wanted to give a kind of a really big shout out because that really has been the most influential resource for me in my sourdough baking journey how about you andrew what resources do you use or have you used i.
Andrea:
Was going to say we’ll make sure and link that in the show notes
Alison:
Yeah definitely i.
Andrea:
Love well of course the art of fermentation as usual i probably will be the record for most mentioned book on this podcast, but that book definitely has a great, uh, layout. So he’s so conversational in that book. I think is what I like about it is I don’t feel like I’m reading this scientific, you know, tome. I just feel like, I feel like as if I had emailed him and say, so what do you do for sauerkraut? And then this is what he sent back to me.
Andrea:
You I love the Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day, which I mentioned before. It’s not completely sourdough, but I pretty much just use the sourdough section to death. And Nourishing Tradition has a little bit on sourdough breads as well and some information about, actually, if you want to know some more of the scientific and nutritional benefits of, you know, fermenting grains, that’s a great book. There’s lots of information in there about that. But I would also say that I’ve looked a lot online, just here and there. I’ll have a question and I’ll look it up online. And like you were just saying a minute ago, that there’s so many different ways to do it. everybody has their own way. I would say rather than looking at that and feeling overwhelmed that you just don’t know how you’re going to get it right, I would say, look at that and say, okay, there’s about 18 million ways to do this. It can’t be that hard.
Andrea:
There’s so many right ways to do it. And then as Allison, you also just said when you get these really specific questions. Oh, I had this lower protein flour that I was having trouble. Okay. Then now you’re going, now you can go into those detailed, you know, comment sections or whatever and read. Um, but just to get started is, um, I think it’s from a philosophical standpoint, weren’t we just need to know you’re basically need to be able to stir a spoon in a bowl I mean that’s yeah that’s about the skill level that’s needed and the fact and
Alison:
Three years on that’s that’s all I still do I don’t have a mixer I just I have my hands and I have a.
Andrea:
Spoon right and I do have a mixer Gary got me one when we first got married and I love my mixer but I don’t even always use it for the bread it’s just so pleasurable to mix bread by hand so satisfying and sometimes i think i just need to go make some bread just for therapy because it’s so relaxing it’s very calming so yeah i agree yeah so look online don’t don’t worry about the fact that there’s bajillion ways and everybody’s going to tell you on their blog that theirs is the one and only way there’s a lot of right ways to do it because they’re everybody in every culture throughout all of humanity has been making versions of this, and not everybody has had access to the same water or the same grains or the same ambient temperatures or the same cooking methods, but everybody figured out a way to make it happen.
Alison:
So tell us what type of bread you make there. And if it’s okay with you, I’d like to hear one of your favorite recipes or your go-to recipes that you use.
Andrea:
Okay. So I love einkorn flour. It’s one flour that just is easy for me to digest for whatever reason. And sometimes I’ll even mix it with bread flour made from wheat, which I find when that’s fermented, I don’t really have any trouble with it at all. And we get our flower from Azure Standard, which is here in our region. And they have farms out here in the, you know, Montana, Idaho, Washington area. And they use what they call a unifying grinder. So the bread is ground. It’s not heated while it’s ground. So that way it retains more of its nutritional content. And
Andrea:
What is my most commonly used sourdough recipe? I would have to say the one out of Peter Reinhart’s book just his whole grain sourdough recipe is probably the one I use the most um although I do have a tendency to even for things like bread say that I make all the time I have a tendency to always be trying new recipes so I do like to just look online and see things or flip through books and find things and try them out just to see how I like them but that’s probably the one i come back to the most nice
Alison:
And and all of your family eat it.
Andrea:
Oh yeah they they’re just happy if i make bread yeah
Alison:
And i heard that you i remember you saying you had loads of rye flour as well so you make rye bread.
Andrea:
Yeah yeah i do i have a lot of rye flour i like i love the flavor of sour rye so um yeah i like that too and i like to do sometimes i do it in pans sometimes i do it in just standing um bulls bulls i don’t know how to pronounce it but
Alison:
How do you get me started on different pans, so i do kind of um it’s similar to you that i’ve tried lots of different recipes and the other thing that’s very similar between our process is the grain that we buy so all the grain that i work with here is Italian grain I use spelt probably for 70 60 to 70 percent of my loaves I also make rye bread regularly which my husband prefers to spelt and, then I make lectin free breads which I use at the moment sorghum and millet, I feel very lucky to live here in Italy, which is really a bread bowl country.
Andrea:
Yeah.
Alison:
So we can get loads of different grains and they’re all local and they’re all beautifully, beautifully kind of ground by individual meals. And they taste wonderful and they’re good for making bread. So I wanted to share.
Alison:
I’ve got lots of recipes for bread on my site, Ancestral Kitchen.
Alison:
Some of them are rye some of them are spelt and some of them are kind of other things you can make with bread but my kind of go-to spelt recipe has been a 100% whole grain spelt loaf with something called a scald in it and a scald is where you take a small portion of the flour you’re going to use in the bread and before you mix it into the dough you heat it up on the stove with water into a kind of a porridge thick porridge and then you add that into the dough before you put in your starter and before you mix it and the reason I work with that with spelt is because I found that spelt has a tendency to go stale quite quickly and also the crumb can be a bit hard and the scourge helps with both of those things it softens the crumb which makes it really a beautiful kind a sandwichy loaf but also it helps it maintain its freshness for a few more days it’s more hydrated so that exactly yeah so there’s a recipe on my um site which i’m looking at now which details exactly how to make the whole grain spelt sourdough loaf with a scored with kind of pictures and all the measurements so that can be can be followed like i said there’s also.
Alison:
Recipes on my site for at least to rise i tend to i have a prized tin here which is made by a company called emile henry oh i.
Andrea:
Love it i have some of their
Alison:
Probably emile omri oh i just before we left England I I owned and aahed about this pan this loaf tin for ages because we were making in um tins that had coverings on anti-stick coverings and we know that just those are just not good things to bake in but I would line them with greaseproof paper so that stuff wouldn’t go into my loaves.
Alison:
And then I saw, I was looking for tins, trying to find, do I get a glass loaf tin? Can I get a ceramic loaf tin? What can I get? And we bought this, Emil, a Henry loaf tin. It’s got a lid with two tiny little holes in it. And it makes the most amazing loaves. The crust is wonderful. Because rather than having to steam the oven or cover your loaf, you know, in a Dutch oven with a lid. Right. just put the lid on and it creates a kind of an ambient steam a steam room inside your loaf tin and that gives the bread the capability to rise up before the crust hardens in the temp in the oven so you get a really good rise but then you get a really beautiful crust too and I’ve used that, literally every time I make bread sometimes I make more than one loaf at a time and I only have one Emil Henry unfortunately so I do use other tins as well but I’d I think that really helps with the quality of the bread that that we produce here and it it’s just such a joy to use because it feels like a a beautiful part of my process you know it’s it’s it’s much valued in our household oh.
Andrea:
Absolutely I love the the way you describe that tin it’s ceramic though so you call it a tin just yeah just as a meaning a
Alison:
Pan yeah pan loaf pan loaf tin yeah but it’s not a tin you’re right it’s ceramic yeah okay just i’m terrified i’m gonna drop it but we haven’t dropped it so far in like two and a half years so it.
Andrea:
Wants to stick around a little bit longer well i i i think the the way peter reinhardt has you do the bread is kind of recreating a situation like that where I will slide it in on, so I usually use a baking stone, and then you can put your bread on and you can rise it for the final rise on parchment paper if it’s just freestanding loaf. And then you’ll slide it in onto that hot stone. And then he has you put up like a metal pan in the bottom and then pour boiling water into it and then close the oven door just to give that that steamy effect. But that pan that you’re describing sounds a little bit easier than that.
Alison:
It is. I’ve done other methods. I’ve done the stone with an upside down big metal kind of bowl on it. And I’ve done steaming the oven. But the pan, the ceramic pan with the lid is just easier.
Andrea:
Yeah. You know what? Sometimes I just like it easy.
Alison:
Yeah exactly which.
Andrea:
Is funny because we’re on
Alison:
Moving on yeah well.
Andrea:
We’re on here talking about these complex situations like and we just want it to be
Alison:
Easy well it’s nice to be able to take something that that perhaps takes a more energy and more time yes and find ways to make it streamlined but also to make it beautiful because i i love my emil henry tin i really do I.
Andrea:
Call it prioritizing. And I always tell Gary, I have to think about what is, you know, maybe spending the money on the tin is a little bit more money to spend, right? But once you have it, now you’ve eliminated just these chunks of tasks that, you know, with pouring the water and things. So I always think to myself, what can I outsource? You know, now I’ve outsourced all that effort of putting the pan in and the water. I just outsourced that to Emil Henry.
Alison:
Yeah i think that’s a good way of looking at it thank you i wanted to um to kind of put picking up on the emile henry and the value of you know i feel really warm and cozy when i think about that loaf tin and talking about um what we were earlier the kind of working together as a team and a household. I wanted to touch on how making bread in the home changes the way that you think about bread and how you value bread. And this is something that, I’m it’s very close to my heart I’m extremely passionate about particularly because it plays into not only how you feel psychologically and as a family unit but it plays into the waste in our world and the environment and local grain economies because I know there’s just a statistic that’s that um recounts that 44 percent of bread made in the uk is thrown away what and yeah we’re not exactly when i read that i just i was staggered so they’ve that’s a million hold on so a million loaves every day are thrown away okay okay.
Andrea:
So so we’re going to put we’re throwing our intellectual and industrial effort behind finding ways to make more faster quicker you know cheaper you know gmo food gmo grains and then we’re gonna try and do this whatever the speedy process you’re talking about to crank out up two million loaves a day just so we can throw half of it away i mean slow it down halfway and stop throwing it away yeah
Alison:
Exactly what i think i when i when i saw when i saw that statistic I thought where is this happening so I did some more research and a lot of it is thrown away in the supermarket food chain so mistakes they make or things that don’t get to shelf or things that are too old a lot of it gets thrown away because supermarkets in this country in the UK do buy one get one free promotions on bread and so people buy two loaves and they don’t need two loaves and so they throw some of it away and, I know in my past, people didn’t like the end bits of bread. My parents didn’t like the crusts. And so a lot of people don’t like crusts. So they just throw away the crust because, you know, why would you? When the bread costs only a few pennies.
Andrea:
Why does it matter if you throw away the crust? The bread is worth, let me tell you, if you or I saw somebody cut off the end of our sourdough spelt loaf and throw it away, I’d have a heart attack.
Alison:
I want the crusty bit. I know that’s my favorite and I think um it it often goes moldy as well I mean you leave the bread yeah in a plastic wrapper in a pot in your kitchen and it’s going to go moldy right and.
Alison:
When I was doing my research there was there’s there’s been a lot of initiatives to try to change people’s opinion on sliced bread so you know how to use sliced bread when it’s old how to make it less stale how to make recipes that involve stale bread in but that seems to be coming from the perspective of well you’ve bought a supermarket loaf and you don’t know what to do with it so this is the way we can stop waste happening and i really think there’s a there’s a much better way at coming at this problem which is just get people to bake wherever they can because if you bake your own loaf you’re, the value the value that you put on that loaf completely changes because you know, where the flour came from how long it took you to source it you know how long it took you to build your sourdough starter up and how much energy went into it you know you put your own hands in there you know you baked it you know you you know put a thermometer in it to see what temperature was and you is it done is it not done and you know the smell that was in your house you know what it looked like you know how it sounded when you cut the first kind of slice of it and you just have a completely different view on bread and italy has a a legacy you know a huge.
Alison:
Swathe of recipes for stale bread because like you were saying earlier on bread was a staple Bread has been an Italian staple for many, many, many centuries. And so there are tons of recipes for stale bread. And Tuscan bread particularly doesn’t have salt in it. So it goes dry quite quickly. And people then have used that bread so creatively to make a ton of dishes that are part of the center of Tuscan food now.
Andrea:
Right, which we’ve now separated completely from the concept of using up the bread. And then we go and buy bread to make the recipe.
Alison:
And it’s a gourmet dish now, you know, whereas it was just a dish that people used to use up our bread.
Andrea:
It was a trash food and now it’s a bougie, expensive, oh, that’s only for the people who can afford it.
Alison:
So I feel as if, you know, the more people can bake, the more people I can inspire to just bake. That’s how to change this bread waste issue because the supermarkets aren’t going to move. You know, the supermarkets care about profit. They don’t care if they throw bread away. They don’t care if they, you know, do the buy one, get one free and people throw the loaf away. The way to get people to change it is to get people to care. And the way you care is by doing it yourself. And so, yeah, I, as you can hear him, I’m kind of, I’m on my soapbox. I feel really strongly about this.
Andrea:
Hey, stay on the soap boxes. It’s really, really true. And, and I think what we also should emphasize here is. The more shocking side of sourdough is that this kind of food goes along with a lifestyle that is slower. And it’s hard to just leap from, you know, I rush, rush, rush, you know, from one thing to the next. It’s hard to just rush from that into, you know, Allison getting rid of her iPhone you know yeah um so I think making graduations along the way picking up one skill at a time and then you know Gary and I upstairs were grinding sausage we’re making little patties tasting it and then wrapping it in you know butcher paper and
Andrea:
Writing the date on it and carrying it out to the freezer and why would we do that when we could just outsource it and pay somebody to do it well part of it is because we enjoy the slowness that it forces on us and we enjoy sitting there and we enjoy you know the kids are up there well they’re not right now they’re asleep but you know the kids were up there with him like helping him shoved the meat into the grinder or, you know, they watched him break the entire pig down and they saw the heart and they, you know, they want to hold the liver and everything. So as you make these little graduations, and I think starting to make sourdough is, is a, would be a huge, wonderful first step right along that way. You start to experience the pleasure that comes from that. It’s a different pleasure than the kind when we
Andrea:
Say when we outsource our ability to entertain ourselves and we pay Netflix to do that. And now Netflix has to come up with something new and fresh and entertain us. But I think it’s pretty entertaining to cut up a pig with your family. And the learning to savor the joy that that produces just in the same way that we learn to savor, you know, the new flavors of the food i think that’s an important aspect of sourdough
Alison:
Yeah i agree i agree and i i think it what you said is small steps is is important because very rarely do you go from kind of in life in the fast lane to that i mean right i know that in my what i call my past life when i was working for microsoft i didn’t do what i do in the kitchen now and i think if someone had told me what I was doing now I would have been like really but each each thing along the line has kind of grabbed me and pulled me in more and each step I’ve taken away from the not that nine to five life slowly slowly slowly to intentionally build something else yeah has rewarded me in ways that that tell me that I’m on the right path you know this is this feels in accordance with my nature far more than what i used to do and how i used to live but yeah it’s small steps yeah sure.
Andrea:
And tara couture who i i can’t remember if i referenced her on the podcast or just when you and i had a conversation no it was you you and i were talking about the gut biome and um she she said i didn’t get here from zero it was little steps along the way and that is what we need to hold in our mind. It’s little steps away. So yeah, sourdough is a great place to start because it’s so fun. It’s so satisfying and it’s very Instagrammable.
Alison:
Yeah, exactly. Oh dear. If someone had said that 10 years ago, we’d have been like, what? How do I get it? Okay, so I’m aware of time. We’re getting close to time. I wanted to just add another kind of little topic in before we end, which is that sourdough is so much more than just bread. So the process of souring grains is used and has been used by various cultures in so many more ways than just producing a loaf. So those some of the things that i do in my own kitchen which are a bit different from the standard kind of sourdough loaf are different processes so using kefir to sour a batter or a dough using a yeast water rather than a sourdough starter i love.
Andrea:
That picture you just posted on
Alison:
Instagram thank you.
Andrea:
I’m so excited
Alison:
Um making muffins sourdough muffins or kefir muffins making biscuits making pancakes there’s a huge history um of making sourdough pancakes making pancakes with discard sourdough crackers making sourdough porridges i know they’re not a dough they’re more a porridge but they’re sourdough porridges there’s sourdough pizza which there’s a lovely recipe for on my site which we have often which i love um and i’ve got a sourdough pancake recipe on my I was like, sourdough is so much more. And in our house, for sure, you know, there are pancakes, as I had for my breakfast. There are muffins. There are biscuits. There are porridges. There is pizza. So it’s easy to kind of get focused on the loaf. But be aware that there’s literally a whole other world around you of all these things you can do with sour grains.
Andrea:
Yes, because the grains, as you said, they’re pre-digested. and they are now available to one-stomached humans.
Andrea:
Sometimes, sometimes we think we have more than one stomach without hungry, but we just have the one doesn’t do very much. It’s kind of pathetic in terms of digestion. If you compare us with other animals out there that can basically eat, you know, rotting meat and they’re fine. Yeah. But that’s not us. But the Charlotte Mason said in her first volume, she has, well, you know, because I’ve been posting this online, but she has a lot to say about sitting down at the table and enjoying your meals. And she says, it’s not the food we eat that nourishes us. It’s the food we digest, which is so powerful for someone to be saying in the 1800s. Yeah. When now we know that if, and she was in 1800s England, where you’re really suffering, you know, you’re getting chalk mixed into your bread. And this is like the boom era of industrialized food and factories everywhere. And, you know, Charles Dickens kind of world, the landscape and she she never says you know ancestral foods but she could tell that we weren’t getting everything out of our food that we once did so
Alison:
That we know that and some you know people who are are tuned into their bodies and their intuition can feel that and um luckily some of them express it and the rest of us learn yeah.
Andrea:
We just try to struggle along no i think you are very very in tune allison you’re very in tune
Alison:
Only because really i’ve i’ve i’ve had to because of because of my weight loss journey because of the journey that i’ve been on right um and also because of moving countries and kind of leaving corporate and all of that stuff i’ve had to to look inside and i’ve had to follow what my body was saying and that’s made forced me to listen to learn to listen to my body um which is not an easy thing to do and bring such rewards that that’s.
Andrea:
Something you’ll see i i’ve noticed a huge trend among homesteaders is well i’m living this life because my child has such severe um you know allergies that he can only drink camel milk and so now we live on a farm and we have a camel. You know what I mean? And this is, this, this drive to nourish ourselves and our families is what is sending people out to the land because they’re just finding, well, it’s just not feasible in the city. So I guess I need, and I know you can do this on a quarter acre, but you know, I just need some space and, and some land. And so here we end up on a patch of grass or trees or whatever.
Alison:
Rob and I talk about this a lot. And, you know, the reason both of us have been what looks like so extreme to outsiders in our journey is because both of us got to rock bottom with our health. And I wouldn’t wish it on anyone else, but I also want the world to change. And I think it’s easy if you if you don’t have challenges like that to coast along and be distracted by things. And so although I didn’t enjoy the struggles that I’ve been through I really wouldn’t ask for anything different because they brought me to a place of such what I feel is such truth and integrity and they keep inspiring me to move forward that.
Andrea:
That’s really pivotal because I mean what you said I guess we need to hire a billboard to put it up there but I think a lot of people have hit rock bottom with their health. The problem is we’re not looking at the food or the lifestyle as the solution. We’re saying, well, I’ve hit rock bottom. Therefore, there’s got to be more pills I can take. There’s got to be something else I can do. And if they don’t, then we’re just told, oh, you just got to live with that. It’s just your future from now on. And I wish, I mean, when you said, oh, I noticed I would get really bad vertigo whenever I had the sugar, you know, Okay, how many people with vertigo are connecting it to their diet right now? I’ll guarantee you, like, zero percent.
Andrea:
Nobody is. Because their doctor is saying, oh, it has nothing to do with your food. I mean, for Pete’s sake, when I asked a dentist about the kids, and I said, so, I just wanted to see what he would say. And I, because I know what I’ve read, but I wanted to see what he would say. And so I said, you know, so can they eat things that would help support the health of their teeth? You know bone broth and he goes no it’s that’s not really gonna do what we eat doesn’t really affect um our teeth and i i just i was like okay you know i wasn’t gonna try to you know change his mind and then two sentences later he said you know the number one thing i see causing cavities in kids is their yogurt and i of course i know he means sugar yogurt so he doesn’t mean yogurt he means sugar but i wanted to jump up out of my chair and be you mean the food does affect our teeth it’s a
Alison:
Matter of um the difference is whether you choose to take responsibility or whether you’re scared of taking responsibility and you pass that on to a doctor or someone else you know and our culture has this don’t take responsibility thing and it’s easy not to take responsibility it’s easy to to to have someone else solve your problems for you but um it’s not a good way to.
Andrea:
Go it would be nice it’d be nice if that worked that would be great but that unfortunately isn’t the way it is and i think what just the the tragedy to me and why i was so excited when you proposed doing this podcast is because the tragedy to me is that we don’t acknowledge that our food is playing such a big role in our health. We don’t acknowledge that our food is affecting our mood and our, you know, vertigo. We pretty much get that food affects weight and that’s about where it ends. And if we could just awaken everybody to the idea that their food is playing a role. I don’t have to tell you to make sourdough or how to make sourdough. Once you have the idea that your food is affecting everything about your life, you will begin to seek out and the things will come to you. But until your eyes are opened to that, you will not see it passing by.
Alison:
Yeah, I completely agree. And one of the pivotal moments of my life of that was when I sat in front of a doctor and they told me, you will never have a kid if you don’t take these drugs. And I was like, no, that’s not true. And then I took my own journey and proved them wrong. And that once you get a little taste of that once you see what’s possible then you just can’t stop because you know about these connections and you know how how things work and that you don’t have to rely on someone else that you can take responsibility and then that will take you on a path that that deepens every aspect of you as a human and we’re getting into some serious topics this.
Andrea:
Is just we’re just talking about sourdough I don’t know what you’re talking about I think
Alison:
We need to um to close I had a quote as well you just quoted Charlotte Mason the, botanical starter book that I’ve been reading that I kind of mentioned a little bit earlier on is written by a guy called Paul Barker and he has a quote at the beginning of it which is that the secret ingredient of bread is passion and I wanted to mention that it seems like a nice way to to round off our passionate kind of discussion then and our discussion on sourdough because really the the bread that is in supermarkets just I couldn’t devoid of passion is is not enough for me to explain how that bread is yes but the bread that we make here and the bread that you can make in your own homes when you when you get a loaf out and it smells wonderful and it tastes wonderful the passion in that is the thing that brings that amazing food to life yes and to bring that into your home and into your kitchen and to your table is just a it’s just a joy and it and it transforms so many things so I wanted to to round off sourdough with that And yeah, thank you for sharing about how you make sourdough and your research you’ve done. And I hope that we’ve inspired a few people in the last hour or so.
Andrea:
That’s the most we can do. Yeah, yeah.
Alison:
Great.
Andrea:
Thanks, Andrea. Well, thank you, Alison. This was exciting. Can’t wait to talk with you again.
Alison:
Me too.
Andrea:
Bye. Bye. Thank you so much for listening we’d love to continue the conversation come find us on instagram andrea’s at farm and hearth and allison’s at ancestral underscore kitchen until next time we both wish you much fun exploration and satisfaction in and out of the
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