#19 – All About Grains: Preparing, Processing and Digesting!
“Not all grains are equal” Alison
With the myriad of anti-grain messaging in the food world, it’s easy to think that eating grains is anything but healthy. In this episode, Andrea and Alison dig a little deeper – they cover the history of grains, why some diets exclude them and share their insight around the importance of and how to prepare, cook and eat them. Whether you enjoy grains regularly, have problems digesting them, are unsure of which grains to eat and how to process them or want to reintroduce grains into your diet, there’s something in this episode for you.
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The run down:
The podcast always starts off with a catch up and discussion of recent meals.
13:44 History of grains & their importance in mankind’s history
23:00 Why people avoid grains
“If the only grain we knew was a soaked soured spelt and a soured einkorn, would we be treating grains the way we do now?” Andrea
38:30 The many ways to process grains so that they are a beneficial food and how to reintroduce grains into your diet
50:13 The ‘spectrum of grains’ – ancient, gluten-free & lectin-free and which of these Alison and Andrea eat
1:02:19 How Alison and Andrea include grains in their day/week
“Experiment and learn to be okay eating something different than what others at your table are eating” Alison
Resources Mentioned:
Gilly Smith – How To Eat To Save The Planet podcast
Nourishing Diets by Sally Fallon Morell
An article about the Nourishing Diets book
Nicolette Hahn Niman – podcast interview on Sustainable Food Stories
Defending Beef, 2nd Ed, by Nicolette Hahn Niman
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all the classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.” – G.K. Chesterton
Nourishing Traditions for Kids (we referenced page 142)
Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon Morell (we referenced page 452)
Our own Patreon! Thank you for sponsoring our podcast!
Alison’s blog with recipes she mentioned
Boza Workshop (the Turkish fermented millet drink) on Alison’s site
Sowans Workshop (the Scottish oat ferment) on Alison’s site
Tudor Monastery: Life on a Monastic Tudor Tenant Farm (BBC Series)
Elly’s Everyday Sourdough on YouTube
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Andrea is at Farm and Hearth
Alison is at Ancestral Kitchen
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Original Music, Episode Mixing and Post-Production by Robert Michael Kay
Transcript:
Alison:
Welcome to the Ancestral Kitchen podcast with Alison, 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
Andrea:
Good morning allison.
Alison:
Hey good afternoon andrea how are you i
Andrea:
Am awesome thank you for asking i’m.
Alison:
Actually sitting
Andrea:
By a fire for the first um time since we’ve been recording we haven’t really had to do many fires yet.
Alison:
But now
Andrea:
It’s getting a little chilly out so we’ve had the ferry going all night and it’s been nice.
Alison:
The weather’s turning here or it has been a little bit suddenly last week it got quite cold and um it seemed very autumnal we went to the market and there was lots of kale and fennel and things like that that’s nice um but then as always happens in italian autumn suddenly the sun comes out and it feels like summer again during during the you know the middle of the day in the morning it’s freezing yeah very very cold and you need to cope but as soon as that sun comes out it it’s wonderful so it’s a sunny day today and so it actually is felt kind of like a i don’t know september day even though it’s nice a lot further along than september which is nice does
Andrea:
Everything um does everybody keep growing all winter there where you are.
Alison:
Yeah yeah pretty much the crops change so instead of all the um kind of tomatoes and melanzane and zucchini and all those kind of crops you turn into the greens so the broccoli appeared last week oh i missed broccoli so much and um tuscan kale caballonero lots of other kale fennel um cabbages that will all carry on throughout the winter um along with the winter fruits you have some chestnuts soon um and pomegranates are appearing everywhere So Gable’s been enjoying whacking those on the back with a spoon to get all the bits inside out. And persimmons and the citrus will start coming in soon. So, yeah, everything really keeps growing through the winter. Yeah, just different.
Andrea:
Such a vibrant cornucopia that you just described.
Alison:
Yeah, colourful and the smells of Christmas with all the different fruits. And I love Tuscan kale so much. the depth of flavor in it that um i could eat it every day i really could
Andrea:
Yeah i’ll bet do you i have some recipes for um supposedly descended from italian recipes for like kale soups and an italian wedding soup, I don’t know. They’re really good. They’re definitely some of our favorite winter soups, but I don’t really know exactly where they originated or why or how they’re, you know, kind of tagged as Italian. Other than that, you should.
Alison:
Send them across.
Andrea:
Yeah, I’ll send them across the ocean. You can analyze them.
Alison:
There are a lot of stews and soups with Tuscan kale in for sure. I love to put them in a slow cooker when I make something up like that because they just they give a flavor that you just can’t compare with any other veg and traditionally they were used in lots of stews with beans and you know bits of pork
Andrea:
Yep that’s what’s in these that’s what’s in these um yeah is is Tuscan kale the one that we call dino kale over here I think I’ve heard it called no.
Alison:
I don’t think so no okay I’m not a kale expert but I remember when we used to go to the market in Penzance in England they had all these different kales and I tried to learn them I think dino kale is the kind of lighter green slightly curly at the edge one but maybe i’m wrong tuscan kale is really dark like black almost and it’s more upright and um flat than dino kale
Andrea:
Okay cool i think well um baker creek seeds that guy is really into i mean his his life mission has been traveling around the world and just like going into the mountains and finding obscure seeds and farmers who have been cultivating just random things for years and it’s really fun to read his books and hear him talk about you know finding all these just varieties that you know a little tiny town somewhere in one mountain is just known for doing really really well and he sells a whole variety of seeds so it’s fun to look and see that some of the history of the specific plant and um yeah why it does so well where it came from and everything like that.
Alison:
Exactly yeah i think that’s something that is is so important for us to to understand and grasp as a society that you know some things do well in some places and some things don’t do well you know the world has very different territories and to eat local means to look around you and say well what can this land around me grow
Andrea:
And to diversify i don’t know if you ever watched the i mean it’s it’s from your people the show downtown abbey um the i i watched it my people, well i i watched it whenever it was coming out um which was it’s i think the first season actually came out in the UK in September 2012. And it must have come here shortly after or right around the same time because that’s about when I saw it.
Andrea:
Um, but anyway, so I’ve been listening to it while I’ve been working on all these really tedious projects, like chopping jalapenos and stuff like that. And, um, cause I’ve seen it before, so I don’t really have to see it again, but I can hear it. And, um, they’re talking about how they’re, you know, the Julian fellows uses all these, you know, historical themes to tell a story and to tell, inform us about the history and stuff like that. And he’s talking about how all these estates and everything were just going to collapse and fail because they didn’t diversify and they didn’t, you know, join the modern centuries and things like that. And then I was thinking about the Tudor Monastery and how diversified they were with, you know, they had all their different varieties of crops, like the peas and the sheep wool and candles and salt and things, whatever they produced. And then I was thinking about Shannon Hayes and how she was saying how, you know, farms over years have always been wildly diverse because you just never know what’s going to completely fail. Like all your hogs could die and, you know, you just have to eat pumpkins for the rest of the year or something.
Andrea:
And then I was thinking about how in modern times, it’s almost like I’m watching Downton Abbey play out again. You know, everybody’s source of income, kind of like the Earl of Grantham or whatever, is just this one thing. And um they’re not that people are more slowly diversifying you know and adapting to the fact kind of like in the whole show’s arc is kind of based on his unwillingness to adapt but um i see i don’t know this has just been on my mind a lot lately thinking about how farms you know have always faced this need to diversify and and if they don’t um you know it can be a real struggle And anyways, I don’t even know why I brought that up.
Alison:
Yeah, I was listening to, I’ve been listening to some podcasts. By the journalist Jilly Smith. She did a series with a chain of restaurants in the UK called Leon, who do some fabulous food in London. They’re like not expensive. You can just go in and take away, but they do, you know, sustainable foodstuffs. And I was listening to an interview with Patrick Holden, the dairy farmer who runs Sustainable Food Trust, and just listening to him talk about diversity and not only how, you know, how people have needed to, but how the soil needs us to because of what the different crops do and because of the different species of animals and insects that are associated with all the different crops. And it just all fits together like a jigsaw when you think of it like that. And I find it absolutely fascinating. And when I think about monocropping and what we’re doing to a lot of the world, it seems so counterintuitive to anything
Andrea:
Yeah it does sensible it does i mean literally but you know the best farming just looks at nature and imitates it almost as closely as possible, and nowhere nowhere do we really see even you might say oh what about the prairie grass well get down in the prairie grass tell me how monocrop that is it is not monocrop it’s highly diverse um and and not to mention it’s a symbiotic in terms of you know you’ve got herds of all variety of animal trampling over it in different cycles and then fires coming through and stuff like that so we just don’t have an example in nature of monocrop like it just doesn’t exist.
Alison:
Yeah, yeah, indeed. We could talk about this for the whole episode, couldn’t we?
Andrea:
Well, okay, we better start. What do you have for lunch?
Alison:
Ah, well, for once, I’m not going to say heart.
Andrea:
Alison has no heart. Get ready for it.
Alison:
Yeah, I had lentils.
Andrea:
Oh, yum, yum.
Alison:
They were very nice. Red lentils, which have been de-hulled, the hull taken off, cooked in some stock with a lot of different spices i can’t remember but i know turmeric was in there and cumin nigella seeds coriander ginger a whole load of other spices um so i cooked that for rob and i gabriel wasn’t with us today for lunch and he’s not so hot with lentils So it was an opportunity for us to enjoy them. And I had two slices of sourdough, one a spelt sourdough with an oat scored in it, the other a rye and barley sourdough, both of them covered in home-rendered lard. And then I had some Tuscan kale, which we just boiled up. And I put lemon juice and olive oil on top of it with my sauerkraut on the side. It was really, really nice.
Andrea:
Now, question on the kale. Do you see anybody in Italy eating it raw, or is it pretty much traditionally cooked or fermented?
Alison:
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone eating it raw, no.
Andrea:
Yeah, I don’t think I see anybody where… Where it’s older eating it raw I don’t know why it’s so popular to eat it raw over here I mean holy cow you have to chew for a really long time yeah.
Alison:
I mean a cabaloneer I don’t know if you can eat raw
Andrea:
Oh yeah it.
Alison:
Takes takes you can cook it forever and it still tastes all right you know it’s like one of those serious vegetables um but the lighter kales yeah I I mean I know that there’s a trend to eat them raw and massage them with salt and mix them with avocado and salad and that kind of thing you’re trying to
Andrea:
Mimic ferment at that point yeah yeah.
Alison:
I i don’t think there’s any traditional dish i might be wrong so that’s true don’t quote me on it but i haven’t seen in any recipe book that i’ve ever looked at you know a dish that’s been around for hundreds of years that has uncooked kale in
Andrea:
It yeah i have not seen one either and i’ve kind of been just looking um i know it’s also also kind of popular to take like the baby leaves because they’re more tender um.
Alison:
And eat those raw
Andrea:
But i don’t really know if that has any sort of historical precedence or not, but that that’s not so good and just i might have to do some lentils this week i’ve got a lot of broth right now so lots of excuse to cook that’s perfect then cook all kinds of the have you had breakfast no am.
Alison:
I making you hungry yes you are
Andrea:
I’ll happily eat some lentils and sourdough for breakfast i’m gonna have a sourdough pancake when i go upstairs and i’ll probably what i’ve pretty much been doing is having a sourdough pancake with two eggs um so that’s kind of been my breakfast right now and then by the time the kids get up i’m ready for breakfast again because if you eat at like 4 30 5 30 6 37 38 30 by the time they get up it’s already been four hours and i’m hungry again so then i make i make breakfast and i’ll happily eat again but um yeah just a sourdough pancake i i’m excited to talk about our subject today because um.
Alison:
Yeah they talking about pancakes
Andrea:
Pancakes definitely feed into what i’ve been learning.
Alison:
About myself so where to start with today we’re talking about grains and i think that this idea came up because i i get a lot of questions in my instagram feed about grains and me too direct messages about them and um particularly in the ancestral eating community you know there are there are a lot of um ways of eating that don’t include grains and um i think i thought it was about time that we we tackled it and i know you want to so where would you like to start where
Andrea:
To begin well let’s go back in history and just talk about you know humans and grains because that’s actually that’s even like a point of controversy nowadays if i can even say that.
Alison:
You know oh
Andrea:
Did humans ever eat grains and things like that so.
Alison:
It’s interesting because i’ve been reading um a book called cytopia by caroline steel the last couple of weeks and she um proposes something that i’ve not read before um about the beginnings of agriculture so the times that um the humans started to farm and that was around 12 000 years ago and i’ve always read before that um before that probably we did eat grains but we only did it kind of sporadically because we could only just you know collect what was growing wild what grasses are going wild
Alison:
And I previously read that, you know, we perhaps settled and started farming because of the discovery of, you know, bread and how we could use bread to fuel ourselves. And I have also read somewhere else that we settled because of the discovery of beer and how people just, you know, could create this fabulous substance that would move them to a different realm with grains. But in Carolyn Steele’s book, she argues that farming started because humans were forced to farm because there were temperature changes, which meant in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, foraging and hunting, particularly for animals, became much more difficult. There were not as many animals going around and therefore man had to adapt. And of course, you know, humans are fabulously adaptable creatures. And the finality of that, what happened was that we settled and started farming. I mean, I’d not heard anyone say that before. And I wondered whether you, whether in all your reading you’ve done about grains, and what you’ve read about the beginnings of farmings and how that relates to the history of grains
Andrea:
That’s kind of funny because what i was actually going to say isn’t from something i read but it’s from something i listened to um but i mean you can go back to the sources and read more about this too but on the history of food podcast which is interesting um you know it’s like like Zootopia you know somebody’s going to share with you both their opinion both archaeological fact and then kind of their thoughts, their conclusions. So he also posits the idea, which I know is definitely not an uncommon one, that, you know, grains were kind of the foundation of civilization.
Andrea:
What’s interesting, Sally Fallon has a book also about, I’m trying to remember the name of what the book is called. I’ll look it up while we’re talking. But she talks about how everybody says, oh, yeah, you know, we were just hunter gatherers and we didn’t really eat grains before. And she says kind of like it sounds like Zootopia is saying that, no, there is a lot of evidence that people were eating grains anywhere and as much as they could find them. And then she relates this interesting story about when explorers went to Australia and they kept commenting on how these fields of grain looked cultivated, but they surely couldn’t be because all the aboriginal people there were nomadic. But she said what they’ve seen in um both like uh north american history and in australia and i don’t know where else if she said other places but they’ve seen that what people are actually doing.
Andrea:
Almost like a form of mobile cultivating. So cultivating and then traveling and then cultivating and then traveling. So you might kind of like the Bible says, one man sows another reaps, you know, kind of like that maybe was her theory. You know, people were cultivating as they went, and they might not necessarily be the one to get the harvest, but because everybody knew it was good for everybody, then that was kind of her theory. Everybody was just sort of cultivating as they went oh it was nourishing diet egalitarian yeah yeah it is nourishing diets how paleo ancestral and traditional peoples really ate i don’t know if it was like a totally egalitarian spirit or if they’re like boy i hope i get to come back here and eat this or not i have no idea she didn’t really theorize too much about that but.
Alison:
Um the thing that um go on
Andrea:
Oh i was just gonna say in the history of food podcast when he also of course everybody you know you can’t talk about the history of food without talking about the Fertile Crescent. And he was saying that he finds it a little bit hard to tell if we started cultivating grains, so we stayed in one place, or we stayed in one place, so we started cultivating grains. But either way, we see the rise of, you know, actually building, okay, now I want to protect, now I have a store of food, now i need to protect it you know so even wars began to arise more so because now you’re like okay well i’m going to draw a line here this is where yeah you know my people are um it’s just so fascinating to see and that came about with you know trying to save preserve store and guard your food.
Alison:
It’s really, it’s fascinating when you, when I have been so brought up and steeped in kind of commercial food culture from the last 50 years. I just finished reading a book on farmhouse brewing, which in which the author talked about the history of farmhouse brewing. And it became really clear to me as I was reading it that literally every household or every farm used to grow their own grains. Yeah you know so there would be a household and they would know that they wanted bread and they wanted beer to subsist for the year and so they would have a field where they grew grains and they did the harvest they did the threshing they did the working or they took it to the local mill and they made the beer and they made the bread and you know whatever grain they had depending on where they were so you know if they were up north they’re more likely to have oats or rye and be making beer or suins or you know rye crackers or oat cakes or if they were down south perhaps here in italy they would be growing spelt or wheat and making different breads with that and it it just is fascinating to read example after example and see pictures in that book that every household grew their own ground and we are so far removed from that now and it’s um it’s not been that long in history since then and yet everything’s completely changed
Alison:
And and grain was I mean grain’s important to us now but like you’re saying grain would have been so important those food stores would have been so important to those people and and great as we know grain was used as a currency for for a very long time um and so it really has had so much worth put on it as as part of our diets through history yeah well
Andrea:
Even i mean the way we measure land we say oh uh how many acres is it um do what do you guys use in uk do you say acres or hectare.
Alison:
Acres yeah okay i use i use yeah i
Andrea:
Mean it’s an old english term um and it means open field, and the way they came up with an acre was it’s how about how much an oxen could plow in a day So, it was literally based on agriculture, was how they were measuring land. And I was listening to a podcast interview with, what’s her name? Nicolette Hahn? Was that or Nicole Hahn?
Alison:
Hahn Neiman. Yeah.
Andrea:
Hahn Neiman. Yeah. She, you know, she… Feels like the plow was not necessarily a good thing for um you know land because as we know once you turn over the soil now you’re losing lots of um bacterias and things like that so you know plowing itself is this whole um kind of historical controversy just because it’s again it’s a non-nature way of mimicking things um but that that was an interesting interview that she gave i can see if i can find it again and link it in the show.
Alison:
Notes she’s a really interesting woman we have to get her on the podcast yeah for sure we’ll link to that and maybe link to her book defending beef in the show notes because that’s fascinating too yes okay so we kind of covered the history and and most of the questions that i get about grains are partially to do with avoiding grains yeah i’m either coming off avoiding grains or should i avoid grains or problems with grains um how can i have not have problems with grains and so i thought it would be useful to talk for a little while about why people avoid grains um and um my own experience of it and then shoot over to you and and talk about that so shall i yeah crack on yeah So crack on with it. So I think the main reason why people avoid grains is that they are relatively hard to digest compared to other foodstuffs. So, you know, for example, a piece of fruit has a simple sugar in it and our body doesn’t need to do much to break that down. Whereas grains, the starches in grains are more complicated. They’re polysaccharides and disaccharides and our body needs to break those down into simple sugars to be able to absorb and use them.
Alison:
And also grains have compounds in them that are toxic and can cause problems for our digestion. So, for example, like phytic acid. So our stomach has to work harder to digest them. And if we have a digestion that’s compromised in some way, which a lot of us do because we’ve grown up in the standard way of eating, then we can really have problems. Whether we have something that’s diagnosed like SIBO or some form of irritable bowel syndrome or whether we just you know have something that we know is wrong but hasn’t been diagnosed you know grains are blamed for lots of things including things you know like brain fog and fatigue and that kind of thing.
Alison:
I think it’s important to say that you know simple sugars like fruits they’re easy to digest but those sugars go straight into the bloodstream which is often hard for the metabolism if we are eating those on their own so grains do have a good side in the fact that they take more time to digest which gives us sustained energy and doesn’t put so much of a pressure on our blood sugar regulation but obviously the bad side of it is our stomach has to work harder. And putting aside for a moment, people who have damaged digestive capacity, really, I think the difficulties in digesting grains or a lot of the difficulties in digesting grains are because we don’t process them in the way that our ancestors processed them in the way that they knew would make the grains easy to digest and neutralise a lot of the lephitic acid um are you of the same mind as me andrea there or what’s your take no i feel
Andrea:
The same yeah i feel the same.
Alison:
Yeah. Okay. So really, the diets that restrict grains, for example, paleo and the autoimmune protocol, GAPs, they are often and best used, in my opinion, for specific periods of healing when you know you have a problem.
Alison:
But if you can move your digestion to a place where it is healing, and you are improving, then judicious choice and processing and use of grains in your diet is a wonderful thing because they are so nutritious, properly processed, they taste amazing, and they can give you such slow release energy. And they are much easier to process than cooking up a load of carrots or swede or things like that, like I did when we did GAPS for two years you know the work that was involved in cooking up enough simple sugared carbohydrate vegetables for us to keep us going was yeah quite something so yeah I think really each of us if we like grains should be aiming to be able to include them in our diet whether we are a long way away from that or whether we’re very close to that and a lot of the questions that I get are people who’ve cut them out for a while and then are scared to start them again and I can completely understand that because as a family we were on gaps for three years and I’ve been
Alison:
Many times before that as well when I ate raw vegan particularly I didn’t eat any grains and so I’ve been long periods of time without grains and I’ve done particular healing protocols and put a lot of energy and effort and love into those and then coming off something like GAPS when you’ve been on it for three years and you’ve not had bread for three years it’s extremely daunting to think about oh my gosh really can I bring these grains back into my life you know they used to do this to me they used to do that to me they used to make me ill and give me brain fog and make me feel fatigued I just don’t want them how can I bring them back into my life and and it’s a huge question and one that I hope that both of us can um can share for the rest of the podcast about um the way that grains can be eaten ancestrally and included in a diet You know,
Andrea:
It’s so interesting, Allison, that just thinking about, like, as you’re talking about, you know, diets and things that we’re doing to leave grains out, we have such a bizarre experience in this modern age in that, like, our primary, like, in the Western, I don’t know, just in…
Andrea:
Like America, I’ll just say, because that’s what I see. So I won’t even comment on anywhere else. So like in America, the biggest problems facing people are coming up with strategies to eat less food. Like, think about that.
Andrea:
That’s our cultural crisis is coming up with mental strategies and games and ideas and, you know, methods to eat less food. Like, that’s what we’re facing now. throughout all of history the number one problem has been that nobody has enough food yeah that’s what we have always faced and now we have literally the opposite problem which is killing just as many people as starvation was it’s like oh my gosh so i was i’ve tried to look and see and i’ve always kind of had an ear out for was there ever a time in history when somebody said, ah, these grains are probably pretty bad for us. I don’t think we should eat them. I’ve not run across it. Maybe it’s out there, you know, but I haven’t run across it yet. Especially the farther back you go, it was always just like, okay, how can we cultivate more of this? How can I, you know, fill my, I mean, the story of Joseph in the Bible is literally, he’s like hoarding grain for seven years and everybody from the countries around him is coming to buy bags of grain they weren’t like i feel like i should only be eating you know lamb right now no they were like give us anything you know um so i i don’t know if.
Alison:
There’s this big thing there’s this well there certainly was this big thing when i was growing up in the uk that grains make you fat
Andrea:
Yes yes and is it this is you know carbs.
Alison:
Make you fat grains thank
Andrea:
You like i yeah totally if you eat you know bagels for breakfast muffins for lunch poppers for dinner yeah you can have a pretty big problem um but i just wonder if um if we’ve ever looked at grains and said you know maybe the grain itself isn’t bad maybe we just have like three generations of abusing the way that, all people have always eaten them and always been able to extract this good energy from them energy that makes you more symbiotic with your farm in the sense that you know you can produce some grains and you can eat some animals but you’re not having to do thousands of either one you know yeah like when you really eat off of your farm not just like oh i went to costco and bought like a ton of meat then um you really have to weigh how much meat you’re going to put on the table every day and we do that balancing act here too because we only have meat that we either raised ourselves or.
Andrea:
That a friend butchered. And so, you know, we have to decide, well, you know, there has to be some portion of organs, some portion of bones, and some portion of meat, not necessarily because we’re trying to achieve this like magic ratio of eating up, but because that’s what we have. You know what I mean? And so sometimes, yes, we’re souring grains to go with the meal to make the meat go farther um so and i i don’t know there’s there’s definitely really popularized carnivore diets right now and i’m not saying anything against anybody who’s doing those like if somebody’s doing that and it’s working for them like i’m not going to get in their way.
Alison:
Um
Andrea:
I just wonder why you know fat was really vilified for a long time um and and right now I feel like grains are getting that kind of treatment.
Alison:
I think that um the demonizing of grains is intrinsically linked to to um industrialization yeah because that’s where the the process of refining grains and creating white flour and feeding the masses on white flour which has less nutrients is faster you know it it’s easy to mix it into something and give you calories to keep you going at a factory or in an office now you know um and it it feels to me like
Alison:
As we come find a full circle from that and people are more informed now and people are taking action around their health and seeing the way they eat that the demonizing of grains will come naturally from that because that’s the grains that we’ve grown up on yeah and yeah exactly i think it’s probably seen yeah is white wheat flour made into kind of fat in salt induced things then then you’re you’re gonna react like that and I think I think as a as individuals it’s easier for us for us to react to something so you know if we think oh gosh these grains are making me ill well okay let’s just go 180 completely other side and cut them out of my diet you know like people look at the factory farming industry and say oh I don’t want to be involved Okay, right. Let’s go 180 and become a vegan.
Alison:
Whereas life is more nuanced than that. And it pays as an individual and as part of a society to look deeper at the issues and the problems and the history of things and to learn more.
Alison:
I don’t know if compromise is the right word. You know, I’m a kind of all or nothing person. So, you know, when I wanted to lose weight age 20, I can’t all fat out of my diet. Well, that was a bit of a mistake. You know, when I didn’t like the industrial meat industry, well, I went vegan. And I look back at these things and I think life is more nuanced. And it’s natural that we might react because of the way we are and because of the way we’ve been brought up and say, I don’t want grains. But I think grains have a lot to offer. We just need to learn how to work with them. Like we can learn how to work with the soil. Like we can learn to work with nature. And we just have to learn how to work with grains by looking back at how the people who knew how to work with them before science told them any of the stuff that we know now and learn from them.
Andrea:
Yeah.
Alison:
I’ve come down off my soapbox now.
Andrea:
That was such a good comparison, Alison. And I think you’re, it is harder to make a nuanced change than it is to like, just do an all or nothing, um, cold turkey cut type thing, honestly. And I wonder if, I truly wonder if grains would be getting the same kind of treatment that they do right now. From everybody if the only grain you knew was a soaked soured spelt and a soured einkorn like if those are the only grains you would ever had would you now be treating them the way that we are treating them now.
Alison:
Probably not and you and you had to cook them yourself in your house so you knew the value of them and didn’t just grab a sandwich or a bit slice of pizza you know so they became a balanced part of a diet rather than than the whole of it yeah it’s really it’s fascinating for me to look back at my own diet you know when when I was a kid because I would have cereal for breakfast so that would be a grain with pasteurized milk on it that had been processed to to oblivion almost yeah to the end of its life and then a sandwich made of bread in a plastic packet from a supermarket oh man and then for dinner sometimes it was potatoes because you know potatoes are a kind of an English thing um very much but often it would be some other form of grain like a you know a pizza style thing or something with pasta in and it it’s amazing how easy it is without thinking in that world to just you know eat the majority of your calories from highly refined sitting on a shelf in a packet grains and yeah we maybe I’m going around in circles here but it’s no wonder that we have problems with grains yeah
Andrea:
Well, and your true British thing would be peas, not potatoes.
Alison:
Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. I’m going back even further.
Andrea:
Let me read this quote and then take us into our next section. So this is a quote I sent you a few days ago. Lexi had posted it on Instagram and I just loved it. It’s from G.K. Chesterton. And he said, Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about i feel like that is the attitude that shaped sally’s book.
Alison:
Yeah yeah okay exactly take us forward
Andrea:
Allison what next.
Alison:
Yeah so let’s stop talking about um why grains have been demonized and let’s start digging into and getting our hands into how we can best process grains in our homes to make them most suitable for us. So maybe I’ll start with kind of an overview of processing different options for processing grains. And then we could move into talking about how we eat and process grains in our houses. How about that I like it okay so what what I want to say about processing grains is kind of useful for anyone who wants to include grains but this is really important and speaks to those who have not had grains in their diet for a while when we came off of the GAPS diet as a family I started processing grains in into sourdough that’s when I started making sourdough and And that really was when I ramped up my fermentation of grains. And since that time, which was five years ago, maybe four, four and a half years ago,
Alison:
The way that I treat grains in my kitchen is completely transformed and I would not go back to eating grains even as I did before GAPS, let alone how I did as a kid.
Alison:
So with grains I mean you can ferment grains fermenting is a fabulous way of processing grains because not only do they get to soak which softens them and makes them easier to digest but they get the action of the fermentation starter whatever it is you put in there those bacteria and those yeasts on the grains and those allow the anti-nutrients in them the toxic plant compounds to be neutralized and they also start the pre-digestion process so they basically just take a huge weight off our own intestines in the processing that it needs to do and makes the grain softer and brings out more nutrients and neutralizes anti-nutrients so for fermenting you can ferment your grains into a porridge you can ferment grains or flour into sourdough bread you can ferment flour or grains into pancakes just like you’re going to do for breakfast in a bit and there’s a big history of making fermented grain drinks certainly throughout Europe with very many different grains and really those four things that I’ve just mentioned Porridges,
Alison:
Drinks, pancakes and sourdough really consists, I would say, 80% of the grains that we eat in this house.
Alison:
And really, it doesn’t have to be complicated.
Alison:
In that, you know, if you don’t know how to make sourdough, it doesn’t matter. You can make a porridge really easily by just blending up some grains with some water and plobbing a bit of whey or a bit of sauerkraut or a bit of yogurt into that and leaving it on the side for a day. That is not a difficult thing to do. Pancakes are really easy. Just do the same, but with flour. You can make flatbreads like that. You can make naan breads like that. You can make little flatbreads or cakes in the oven like that. You know, you do not need to be a whiz at sourdough. And I mean, sourdough has very many levels of complication in that, you know, at one end, there’s the really open crumb, tartine, wonderful. You need a very strong skill set for it. But really what you need to be healthy and happy is a simple bread on your table. So you know even if you think you can’t do sourdough there’s a there is a simple way of making sourdough
Alison:
And really our ancestors just did this you know they they worked with the grains they milled it themselves and then they left it out with water and and it fermented before I am before we did gaps most of the fermentation I did of grains was without a sourdough starter because I wasn’t used to ferment buckwheat I used to soak whole buckwheat groats and ferment them wild literally just leave them and then I’d pour that batter of those fermented oat wheat buckwheat groats into a pan and make a in quotes bread I used to do the same to make a pizza base because I didn’t make sourdough but I still fermented a lot of grains you know it doesn’t it really doesn’t have to be complicated um do you want to add something to to fermenting and processing andrea well
Andrea:
I i guess what i want to say is that it is very very simple and easy and i’ll use the quote that i know i’ve used a number of times on here from slow down farmstead which is it’s not hard it’s just different so.
Alison:
Yeah um
Andrea:
I definitely feel like like there’s a lot of people who listen to this podcast who they are like i’ve been making sourdough for a long time and then there’s also a lot of people who are like hey i’m looking i you know i want to start eating grains you know maybe a more, humane way and um so i just want to do what i can to help dispel any myths i think the fact that there’s so many huge hardcover glossy shiny beautiful books about making sourdough bread it can start to feel really intimidating but it is actually quite quite basic and then you can just um, expand on it from there and get fancy if you want to, kind of like you said. And the.
Andrea:
Nourishing Traditions book, she actually has a Nourishing Traditions cookbook for children that I recently got. And honestly, if somebody feels intimidated about this stuff, just get the Nourishing Traditions book for children because it is beautiful. It’s very simple um she has enough of the science in there that you literally know what is going on but it’s not like drowning you in information and and then you can see that it’s so easy that like a five-year old can do it it’s so so simple and a lot of these foods that allison and i talk about, are very fast when you’re actually preparing them as long as you did that step you know the day before or whatever like these pancakes i’m gonna have for breakfast i i mixed them i don’t know four days ago like it’s so easy i just got to get the jar out and pour it on the hot stove and it’s done right yeah but um so a lot of ancestral food like we’ve said before it is fast food the grains are fast food once they’ve been pre-processed just like and it just takes that extra step in the advance um which can be the hard part honestly because you’re like oh i didn’t do that yesterday but getting more in the habit of it helps so yeah.
Alison:
It’s a slow process once you start remembering a few days then it’s a
Andrea:
Habit that and it’s not like you just grow in there spending an hour making breakfast or lunch or whatever um, You did that little step the night before, the day before, whatever, and you let the chemistry do most of the work and now you just have, you know, to cook it very quickly. So, yeah, it does.
Alison:
The other thing that I thought would be useful to talk about, particularly for people who want to reintroduce grains, is the idea that not all grains are equal. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think people, most people know that kind of processed wheat is perhaps not the grain to start with if you haven’t had grains for a long time. But remember that there is a spectrum of grains. So if you want to do something similar to wheat, but not wheat, there are lots of ancient varieties of wheat that are less complicated, have been less modified along the centuries. There are also spelt and various versions of spelt, the einkorn and the spelter and the emmer. In addition, there are many non-gluten grains that can be used and bread made with them. So the example of buckwheat that I gave you earlier on is a non-gluten grain, which you can use to make into bread or make pancakes with or make a porridge with really nicely.
Alison:
The other thing that’s been quite important in our family’s life is lectins and lectin-free grains so lectins are a plant protein which is created by the plant in order to ward off predators and it’s a toxin and for some people it’s a problem it can cause inflammation in the body and then the various symptoms that come from that depending on you know what your leaning is whether you end up with eczema or brain fog and lectin-free has been quite important for us in healing our son Gabriel in that we took him as far as we could with gaps and the various other protocols we’ve done and all the processing of grains I’ve done but we still around six months ago had an issue and it was really understanding lectins and experimenting with things that we thought he was eating that might have a he might have a problem with that we’ve come to understand that he does have a problem with some lectins and so the grains millet and sorghum which are both available here locally in Italy are lectin free
Alison:
And I use those in my kitchen every day. I think that they’re easier for us to digest because they’re gluten free and lectin free. But they’re really nice and can be made into porridges. They can be made into drinks. They can be made into pancakes. And I make a bread with them too. And so if I would say if you’ve been off grains for a while and you want to reintroduce them, listen to your own body and you know experiment think about the things you’ve had problems with in the past and try perhaps with some of the lighter grains first ferment them and see how you get on with those before perhaps you move to some of the other grains that might be slightly more difficult to digest and that’s been our experience and I thought that might be helpful yeah to um to the daunted people out there who who want to start grains again but I’m sure how to yep do you eat lectin-free grains or any of that kind of millet sorghum buckwheat gluten-free stuff well
Andrea:
We do have them mixed into things but we don’t really have a special focus on it yeah i actually couldn’t tell you.
Alison:
So what what grains do you use um
Andrea:
Let’s see well we use a pretty wide variety i do have some wheat we don’t use loads of wheat but we do have wheat um let’s see einkorn lots of einkorn obviously uh spelt.
Alison:
I don’t
Andrea:
Know do I count buckwheat I mean it’s isn’t it’s.
Alison:
Technically a seed but I think yeah no I count it yeah
Andrea:
Um if we’re counting grains we do have rice we don’t use tons of rice but we do have it from time to time I’m trying to think what.
Alison:
Else And do you eat whole grain rice or white rice?
Andrea:
No, we eat white rice.
Alison:
And why do you do that?
Andrea:
It came down to digestibility. So it seemed like the, I don’t know, maybe we’ll try the brown rice again sometime. But it almost seemed like the symptoms were worse with brown rice.
Alison:
Yeah, I would concur with that. And the reading that I’ve done concurs with that, that there are more of the things that you would have problems digesting in the brown rice.
Andrea:
I don’t know. Is there ways to ferment rice? I have no idea.
Alison:
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Andrea:
I mean, other than like koji rice and things like that.
Alison:
Yeah, but you can mix it with, traditionally in India, mixed with pulses to make dosas. Oh, yeah. Pancakes. Yeah. And with so often I’ve done, I haven’t done it for a while, but rice with lentils blended up, fermented, and then put in the cast iron pan into pancakes. Really, really lovely.
Andrea:
Our kids love… Excuse me um rice and milk which probably sounds disgusting to most people, um i think it’s i think it’s like a descendant of a milk pudding type thing or rice pudding type okay yeah um so every once in a while we make that kind of as a well to them it’s like a special treat to me it’s a special treat too because i make it if i just don’t have time to do anything else and so they get so excited because it’s i mean it’s rice who doesn’t love hot rice with raw milk on top right so um they love that but and they they ask for it all the time but i’m always telling them you can’t really eat that all the time it’s not really like a meal exactly, it’s not really uh got that much nutrition in it for you so it’s kind of just one of those special emergency type things um.
Alison:
Talking about rice i remembered that um kobo from entry on instagram talked me into making um an indian dish and i’ve forgotten what the name is um and it was rice that had been cracked so i put some white rice in my coffee grinder and cracked it a bit and then i fermented it for three days and then i cooked it up um and i added some coconut milk because gable can’t have normal milk and traditionally it’s been served with kind of coconut and sweet spices and jaggery the name for sugar kind of unprocessed sugar in india and it was really delicious and gable liked it you just talking about your kids with rice and milk reminded me of that fermented rice dish and then i used i used the water that i fermented the rice in to wash my hair with because there’s some research that this tribe in the mountains somewhere these women have gorgeous hair in their 90s and they wash their hair with the with the soak water from from fermenting rice so um i got persuaded into trying because i think some rice it has certain proteins in it and maybe this is true for any soak water you would put in grains i don’t know someone should should do an experiment that it makes your hair all shiny because um it’s got lots of good things in apparently well
Andrea:
I feel like we use that sounds great to me i feel like we use a pretty wide range of um grains we also we’ve always almost always had teff on hand um i know aaron did that amazing video for the um yeah patrons.
Alison:
The patron yeah and
Andrea:
He talked about using teff to make the um injera pancakes, and so i i bought more because when i went to go get some out and make his pancakes i didn’t have anymore so i ordered some from azure but um yeah we use a pretty.
Alison:
Wide what gets what’s grown where where you are what’s what’s grown oh there’s locally or kind of semi-locally here um
Andrea:
There is a decent amount of grain production out here but i would say the majority of those kind of big crops happens over the mountains on the desert side just because land is so much more expensive over here um yeah so the any farms with like huge fields that are producing an income are farms that have been in a family for a long time because if you bought the land now it would be impossible to make an income off of it.
Alison:
Oh interesting okay not impossible just much more challenging hard yeah there’s there’s a lot of grains grown here in italy because the weather and the soil has adapted to it you know and obviously italy is relatively famous for for spelt and the roman army being run on it and but wheat is grown here and rice is grown here and the millet and the sorghum that i buy is grown here and oats are grown here our rye is grown here really quite locally um and so we are we are blessed in the uk um i remember i could get almost all of the grains i struggled to get buckwheat the faux grain um and the um health food store where i used to buy it said it was um from the packet said it was from england and i was like buckwheat grown in england i didn’t know that because i would buy it in bulk from the supplier if it was and it ended up actually it was grown in china but the people who put it in the packages put
Alison:
England on it, which was nice. But England, it has a relatively good selection of grains. I could buy wheat that was grown there. I could buy spelt that was grown there and rye and flowers. But also in the shops, there are a lot more flowers and grains from outside the UK. Whereas here in Italy, you really don’t often see flowers and grains that are grown outside italy in the shops
Andrea:
Right oh that’s amazing that’s awesome when we started eating iron corn a long time ago the only place we could get it was actually from italy oh wow really yeah yeah young living has um some farms here that grow it now and they have a farm in france that grows it um but you still kind of got to get it when you can get it because you know the it it’s an older variety right so it doesn’t you can’t do you know as many rotations as quickly as you can with like modern wheat or something and then also because it’s not chemically treated in the field um at least the you know the young living one isn’t then it can actually go rancid you know more quickly like on the way to being cleaned and stuff like that so kind of got to get it when you can get it um but we do love that because it oh my gosh it tastes so much better than um honestly i’ll be totally honest theirs tastes better than any einkorn brand i’ve ever tried anywhere else but um, Also, just comparing it to modern wheat and realizing, like all the modern versions of food versus heirloom foods, yes, the modern ones are more convenient.
Andrea:
They’re genetically designed to be more convenient, but they have no freaking taste. They literally have no taste. The first time I tried einkorn, I was like, wait a minute. It was like the first time okay when i when i was a kid we had like bags of dried parsley and like pre-ground pepper and then when i had parsley for real i was like wait a minute parsley has a taste and then when i ground pepper i was like wait a minute pepper spicy and so then when i had the i was like wait a minute grains have a flavor like i didn’t know it’s.
Alison:
Amazing i have that thing with parsley you know there was always a jar of dried parsley in my mom’s cupboard and it’s just like you put the parsley in here and then when I had real parsley I was like oh my gosh this stuff is amazing
Andrea:
Like I just didn’t know so so yeah so trying the older varieties of grains is kind of mind-blowing because I feel like spelt especially when you scald it the way that you do um I know you do it for the crumb but also it the flavor is fantastic um so trying these these older varieties of grains are just so exciting and and maybe that’s something we should also mention if somebody doesn’t know when when you’re talking about like spelt and emmer and einkorn and things like that these are tend to be old um versions of grains and what i mean by that is over the years you know with an animal with a plant with anything you know farmers start to notice which which crop did well and then they can kind of they can cross crops they can you know save seeds from specific ones and then come into the modern era and rather than even just sort of um kind of naturally evolving like sort of forcing the what you want to say like survival of the fittest sort of forcing it into a expedited version as farmers are doing now come into the modern day and you can go into a laboratory and like manipulate the genes of the plant to do what you want to the point that modern wheat has some like 36, I want to say, chromosomes.
Andrea:
None of which, none of which are identifiable by the human body, because none of them are original to the plant at this point. Even an organic wheat raised without pesticides, an organic germ wheat would still have those unique chromosomes. Whereas einkorn, which is the oldest form of wheat that we know of, has like 12 chromosomes. Like, it’s just so different. You know, it’s much taller, which, you know, from an agricultural perspective, you don’t want taller wheat because it takes longer to grow that tall, right? And then you can harvest it and plant again within the same year and aggressively harvest more out of that field. So that what, Alison, the UK can throw away 50% of their bread? Like, what are we doing this for?
Alison:
I know. No. And this is why ancient grains are more expensive than wheat.
Andrea:
Yes, that’s a great point.
Alison:
Because it’s harder to grow them. That’s a great point. Awesome. But really, you know, if you value the food and you’re making it at home in the kitchen, the quantities in which you eat them and the nutrition that you get from them, in my opinion, are worth prioritizing the money for them rather than using standard wheat. Yeah.
Andrea:
Well, you’re not going to be doing it.
Alison:
Actually eat standard wheat really so yeah he can’t that’s why yeah that’s why we don’t use it so tell us how how you eat grains in your house how you prep them and tell us what how often you eat them you know what quantities you eat
Andrea:
Them well not as much as i’d like actually would like to eat them more um okay but i have to get back into a bread making rotation but um we well our fermented oatmeal that’s definitely one of the ways we eat grains um that’s for sure a popular one um sourdough bread which is you know just sourdough bread however people make their bread um pancakes sourdough pancakes trying to think i feel like those are the main ones um we have tortillas probably at least once a week sometimes more but they’re not fermented or anything like that so i can’t say that those follow all the ancestral rules bizarrely enough if i have like one tortilla it doesn’t seem to um like like the problem doesn’t seem to be so great you know what i mean whereas if i were to eat like yeah you know a bunch of slices of bread or something like that i would be like bloated and everything would be horrible um.
Andrea:
What else do we do? There was something. Oh, I recently tried this. Like I purchased these frozen sprouted wheat bagels to try. I’ve been using them when we put together. So when we put together breakfast for the hip campers or the glampers, we either do like the sourdough pancakes and then they make their own pancakes up there at the tent or like bagels with some of our homemade jam and stuff like that. Um so i got those as kind of like just to have in the freezer ready and we ate them and, i you said you don’t sprout grains correct i i don’t typically either just because it’s not for bread yeah it’s just easier for me to ferment it um but i tried these sprouted ones and basically i had zero effects it was all it was like as if i had eaten sourdough which I thought was very interesting because I thought for sure it was going to be not like that.
Alison:
That’s interesting because the sprouting process would have converted a lot of the complex carbohydrates into simple sugars. So you would expect it to be easier to digest because you literally would be eating many less complex sugars. I think several people have asked me do i sprout my grains and the only reason i sprout grains is to make malt to make ancient beer i i don’t sprout them routinely for bread i might do if there’s one something i want to experiment with and the reason i don’t sprout them is really twofold on the kind of the push side it’s a lot of work it is oh my god you know to get the grains to soak them to put them in a thing and then to rinse them and to watch them sprout and then if you’re going to put them in a bread really you’ve got to dehydrate them
Alison:
But also because the way that we process our grains, you know, 80% of the time in this house, I don’t have any problems with and neither does Rob or Gabriel. Yeah, exactly. So there’s no need for us to sprout them. Having said that, we just changed suppliers of our grain because the rye grain that I was buying didn’t sprout and I wanted to sprout it to make beer. So I’ve changed to a new supplier and I ordered some um let’s get this right in English not Italian oats and millet and rye and spelt from them in bulk last week in five kilogram sacks and I thought well let’s just try spouting them all and see you know what what spouts and what doesn’t because we needed the rye to sprout for beer and so I had four little jars and a little of each of them and the rye was sprouting away like crazy the spelt started to sprout but much more slowly and the millet and the oats didn’t sprout at all what I did though this morning um actually last night because I’d my experiment was over I put all of them into the food processor with some water and a bit of sourdough starter and I blended it up put it in a bowl and left it out overnight and i had it this morning for my porridge it was absolutely delicious and i
Alison:
Kind of remember that the the smell and the taste of sprouted grains is very very nice it’s very comforting yeah i i’d like to do it perhaps a little bit more often than i do but i don’t think for our case in particular we haven’t needed to sprout them and it’s a lot of work to do it so i think that the fermenting and the proper kind of eating of them and including fats when you’re eating them is for us at least much more important than the sprouting portion well
Andrea:
It certainly fits your routines you know and yeah um i was i was thinking about looking and seeing if i could buy some sprouted wheat and try baking like a regular bread with it and see how i do with it just to see um you know i don’t know because it would be nice to be able to just say oh i didn’t think about it but i want to make some bread right now you know um yeah and when i i did that a couple weeks ago and it was great like just a regular fast yeast bread like instant yeast bread it was great and everything but of course i felt like garbage so um you know that’s the.
Alison:
Time you should I’m interested to hear what comes of it, to just get some and try it and see how you get on with it.
Andrea:
I wonder if it would…
Alison:
So do you eat grains at every meal? That’s… Not… I don’t know whether you said that.
Andrea:
Not always, but… Yeah, not necessarily. Like oftentimes, I’ll make us a big stew or something like that. But I don’t have any bread made or anything like that. We just eat like the stew.
Alison:
And has the stew got carbs like carrots or something in it or not?
Andrea:
Oh, yeah. Typically, I’ll put a carb in it, you know, some potatoes or something or starch. Some sort of something other than just the meat and the broth and things like that. But doesn’t necessarily always have something on the side. although I don’t think anything goes better than stew and a chunk of bread, and some some larder butter to go with it, nice um but what were you.
Alison:
Gonna say when I um when I talked over you and asked you how much how many grains you ate
Andrea:
Oh I was gonna say I don’t know I feel like it fluctuates it doesn’t really stay like sometimes I’ll get on a kick and we’ll we’ll just have sourdough bread you know, just commonly for a while and then i’ll get off the kick and i’ll get like like with all this canning and everything we did in september i everything was kind of short short order type things like the pancakes the breakfast casseroles yeah which i guess has grains and your breakfast.
Alison:
Casseroles are grain as well yeah
Andrea:
Yeah.
Alison:
Yeah.
Andrea:
Um, just, just tend to be shorter things. Yeah. Quicker things.
Alison:
Um, nice. Yeah.
Andrea:
We did some, um, like cook, cooked meat and vegetables and cheese and stuff like that. And either just have, have that with some beans or, um, roll it in a burrito, um, or have it in a bowl of some rice. You know, that that’s kind of a fast thing that, that we had a couple times um just feel like the the food i served during those kind of intense seasons tends to be more boring.
Alison:
No i can understand that completely boring isn’t necessarily bad boring allows you to do other things no yeah
Andrea:
It wasn’t bad everybody’s i mean nobody complained maybe they just know better.
Alison:
I think that you know because you um do lots of canning and you have a more seasonal um what’s the kind of phrase you’re more informed by the seasons in the fact that the growing happens a lot in the summer than here whereas we were saying at the beginning you know all the growing happens a lot over winter here as well and there’s there’s just other things right we tend to um have a more routine yeah with our grains than you are throughout the year we’ll do a similar thing and also because it suits me I’m yeah I I like to have that routine and keep it going and have that security so it’s my personality as well something I could I’m sorry now go on I
Andrea:
Was gonna say that that’s something do you remember I mentioned a long time ago Kitty Bloomfield And that’s something she talks about a lot if you came out of like a diet culture or a starvation culture or restriction type culture. She talks a lot about how you have to, she actually thinks it’s important if you need to for a while, continue as long as necessary to eat the same thing kind of on repeat. Like not not like you have the same food every day but like your rotation is familiar and comfortable because you said you have to build like safety for your body to feel yeah like i know the food is coming and i won’t be starved again um so it’s interesting that you mentioned that that in context of i think.
Alison:
That’s a sensible thing. I think that for me, for the boys, GAPS was positive. For me, GAPS had a lot of downsides in that I do not metabolize fat in the same way that they do. And no matter how much I tried to teach my body to metabolize fat, it really didn’t shift in the way that I wanted it to. And so when we came off GAPS, I was really hungry, like really hungry, because I hadn’t had grains for a very long time. And I really struggled to get what I needed from the simple carbohydrates that were in GAPS. Oh, great question. And I feel like it took me a while to settle into a routine with bread. I was talking to Rob about this the other day, you know, just before we recorded the comfort food episode,
Alison:
In that he said to me, you know, the last time really that you exhibited anything in the form of overeating or comfort food was when we came off GAPS because I’d not had bread for two and a half years and I started making sourdough and I could eat it and it was my body needed something more and it went through a phase of oh my gosh and my psyche went through that phase as well and it balanced itself out after a couple of months and you know now I have bread all around me all the time and I don’t have issues with it but you’re right that there’s something there’s something psychological but there’s also something deeper that happens when we’ve been on something that’s restrictive for a while and for some people it causes issues and therefore there’s a bounce back you know yeah now
Andrea:
I have a question for you because I really want to know your thoughts on this I thought about this before when I was thinking about this podcast but um, what you’re saying and then you mentioned, you know, Rob and Gabriel versus you and things like that. So that makes me think about it again. Sometimes I feel like I see a lot more males promoting carnivore and or paleo than females, which is not to say that there’s also like, obviously there’s also females, but it just tends to be that I feel like I see more males. And i then i’ve also i was talking to um amanda um who is looking at gaps and stuff like that and yeah i think she’s still breastfeeding and she said when she talked to a gaps coach they said she should probably keep grains and i was thinking about whenever i’ve been breastfeeding and oh my gosh, like, you’re so hungry, like all the time.
Alison:
Yeah, I mean, I ate the house when I was a few months, the few months that I did breastfeed, I ate the house.
Andrea:
But then it just makes me think about women in general. And then I started thinking about like, okay, women and men in history, what we’re doing, you know, the women come to be, like we said, you’re physically closer to the home with the infants and things like that. The men possibly physically farther afield, kind of bringing back the bacon, as it were, you know, depending on the society. And so I wonder, do you think possibly, maybe, do females have like a slightly higher need for grains or a more invested need in it? Like guys could get by without it maybe easier than females could? I don’t.
Alison:
It’s a really good question. And there’s so many things that I could talk about just from my opinion on that. Two things I would say. I think that men and women have different metabolism in my experience. With all the partners. Not that I haven’t had like thousands of partners, but I’ve had a few.
Alison:
And they’ve all had different metabolisms to me. And they’ve been more adapted to fasting than I’ve been.
Alison:
They’ve had less trouble going long periods of time without food than I have. And maybe part of that is because they’re better fat metabolizers than I have. So maybe part of that’s my history.
Alison:
Right um but it you know it’s still my experience the other thing i would also bring into it is i think that generally women are different have different styles of eating to men i’m a sensual eater i love eating i love the textures i love the flavors it’s really important to me how my food smells how it looks rob’s really not that bothered he appreciates it and he loves seeing beautiful food and smelling it but you know i have to prompt him sometimes to say god this is this smells wonderful just you know close your eyes and smell it you know and and he would left to his own devices which he often is he’ll if something’s more important he’ll go without lunch yeah you know he’s not bothered if if all there is is a carrot and a bit of old heart and a chunk of bread he’ll put the three of them on the plate not even chop the carrot up and eat it And I think that plays in to women’s need for more, perhaps more regular sustenance and a different type of sustenance. And I don’t know any science behind it. That’s just my opinions. But I think also what you’re saying around childbearing and breastfeeding and the different roles that women had,
Alison:
I do think that the needs and the timings of food would have been… Probably have developed differently. And I feel that very often, what I have felt often as a woman, that I need to be able to replicate what Rob can replicate, otherwise I’m not good enough. So if I can’t fast for a week, or if I can’t go from four in the evening till 10 in the morning without eating, then there’s something I’m doing wrong. But I think I’m different to him. And it’s important for us all to listen to our own bodies rather than to listen to what someone says we should be doing and experiment and learn and be okay with eating something different to the people around us and to the people on the other side of our table if we have to you know
Andrea:
And you have to be really.
Alison:
Cautious we don’t eat the same
Andrea:
Really cautious about letting somebody dictate what you’re doing because that person might be speaking from their experience and if it’s a male yeah speaking to a female a male who’s never maybe even gone through starvation culture and has a totally normal metabolism and the circadian rhythm and he’s talking to a female who um you know essentially went lived through a famine for 10 years yeah and has and.
Alison:
Brought up two children and breastfed
Andrea:
Them yeah yeah birth birth babies and um yeah and operates on an infradian rhythm um then yeah yeah it’s going to be a totally different conversation and and i do feel like um uh we when you say listen to our bodies like it is really important and it is hard sometimes in culture and instagram and all the things around you are screaming at you all these things you know do this don’t do that you know and and you almost can’t even hear what your own body is saying but then you hear women saying things like oh i was like dreaming about um bread and and like you know like all these just just bizarre things and you’re like okay well maybe you need a piece of bread yeah.
Alison:
Yeah exactly totally interesting maybe you need a piece of bread maybe you need some butter yeah let me talk about um
Andrea:
What what we.
Alison:
Eat grain wise how much we eat and how we do it because i’ve made a big list and i want to read it
Andrea:
I’m ready so um.
Alison:
I would say that I eat grains three meals a day, mostly. Sometimes we roast vegetables and we’ll have those at a meal. But generally, I eat grains three times a day. So sourdough is the backbone of what we do. And we have sourdough spelt bread. We have sourdough rye bread. We put barley in both of those sometimes. And we have a lectin-free sourdough that I make from millet and sorghum flour. Um and generally I will eat certainly the spelt sourdose I’m more adapted to spelt Rob’s more adapted to rye I noticed when I started to eat rye again that my blood sugar didn’t do so well with eating rye so I don’t have rye so much um I mostly have spelt so I make the rye loaves for Rob really sometimes I can’t resist them though um and I have that usually at lunchtime because it’s the most dense of the carbs I will have and therefore it needs more of my digestion so I have it at lunchtime. There are recipes all over my site for various forms of sourdough so if you want to know how I make any of those you can you can go and find the recipe on my site.
Alison:
The other main way that I ferment breads and have ferment grains and have the most days is either in of porridge a polenta or a polenta bread so I had porridge this morning and I think generally once a week I’ll cook up some grains that we’ve usually ground and then I fermented overnight into a kind of a porridge and then I’ll put the remains into a loaf tin and squash it down and then have it as a polenta bread in the fridge. There are videos on my website that explain in depth how I make those.
Alison:
And I generally have that porridge or some form of porridge for breakfast. We have pancakes. That one is usually maybe once a week because they take a bit more time to fry in the cast iron pan to do them for all of us. So they’re like maybe a weekend treat that we have for breakfast. Um in addition to that we make um two fermented grain drinks that we have almost every day the first one I made for Gabriel and I’ve talked about it before on here it’s called Bosa and it’s a millet drink so I made that for him because I wanted him to have more probiotics but he can’t have dairy and so I kind of did the research for that and that is a beautiful it’s gluten-free and lectin-free and we drink it really so Gabriel drinks it.
Alison:
For some meals along with the other starch that he has that’s on my website the bowser there’s a course on it and then the um I love oats I absolutely love oats Rob doesn’t love oats so much um but I discovered how to make suins a Scottish ferment about a year ago and I’ve been making that almost every week from oats that we grind here um and I often have that for porridge
Alison:
In the morning and then I’ll have the liquid the drink as well from that so generally I’ll eat it three times a day I eat grains three times a day either a porridge or some of the suins in the morning sourdough at lunchtime the only other way we do grains which is not fermented is we often cook millet and sorghum on their own in stock we use those two grains because they’re the easiest ones to digest so we’re not fermenting them and they’re lectin free and gluten free and we’ll cook those up in some heart stock or in some bone broth that I’ve saved and serve them as a side with what we’re eating with some some fat on so often I’ll have that for supper sometimes I have the lectin bread for supper so yeah three times a day but um really really good grains and i and i’m really happy that i’ve got the routine going where i can ferment them and give them to my boys i love it and
Andrea:
I love that boza because it’s it’s so unique and different and i’m gonna link i know for the boza and the suins you have actually made like courses that people can buy and learn you know, from you on video. So I’m going to link those in the show notes. Just if anybody hasn’t already seen those. I’m so inspired, Allison, by how… I don’t know if regular is the right word, but I like the patterns that you have. I feel like I am sort of getting more towards that direction of having a pattern. And then as soon as I think that, then we end up with like a thousand bottles of apples or something. And I just, everything just helps them to know. But I do like that because I feel like that is something that my metabolism needs. Because we all eat the same thing over here and we have for a while. But post third baby, my body has just not responded the way that it did after the other ones. And so I’m like, okay, something is just like, I’m just like waiting and nothing’s happening. I’m like, come on. So I wonder if getting more of my routine down because I do feel like being sporadic is just because of my history with like, you know, starvation and stuff like that. I i feel like i really need those routines um.
Alison:
I think metabolism is really i mean it is a very personal thing and it changes over time so you know once you if you were to instill that routine over a little while that might change and your needs might change but um to to give your body that to stop it perhaps going into a place where it’s digging deeper than it needs to um for me that certainly is is something that works for me i mean i i yeah i haven’t had any problems with weight since i started including grains again in my diet after gaps and i do feel like i have a ton more energy than i had right at the end of gaps so i don’t want
Andrea:
To be really i have to be really careful because i know i know what i could do to force my my weight down, but that is not something i’m willing to do it’s just so unhealthy i would rather take the time and let it take the time um.
Alison:
To i think that time thing that that’s a it’s a um a useful and um i can’t remember what the word is i’m i’m glad to hear you say that because i think you know many times in the past I’ve done things in my diet because I’m not willing to wait the time and you know it’s easy to say with hindsight you know I just can’t it’s easy to say it with hindsight you know when I if if I’d known if I knew back before I started GAPS what I know now then I probably would have approached GAPS slightly differently it did wonderful things for Gabriel and wonderful things for Rob and some really good things for me too. But I’ve very often gone at things that
Alison:
With um with a hammer really because I want a result and really there it’s it’s not as satisfying being slow it’s not a satisfying thing okay you know what I haven’t had grains for two years what I’m going to do is I’m just going to ferment a bit of millet and make a porridge once a day and do that for a month and see what happens because that’s not you know it doesn’t give you an answer it’s frustrating it requires attention and time and but really in order to get to a peaceful place with food rather than swinging from one side to another which I’ve done many times you know in in the past it the slower and more conscious and patient you can be the better I think yeah
Andrea:
And I’m I’m definitely agree with you on that because I feel like if I hadn’t done all those radical things in the past, I probably wouldn’t have as much trouble as I do now. You know what I mean? Like, I feel like I created the problem for myself and I know I could maybe give myself a short-term fix right now, but that would leave me 10 years down the road again in, you know, in, in a lot of, in a lot of trouble.
Alison:
So I’m trying. Amen.
Andrea:
My conclusion is that if I’m just following an ancestral diet, the closer and closer I can get into doing it, um there is equilibrium in that and so i have i’m just like okay come on give myself the time to feel it and and i feel like the routine is helpful for that because actually just this yeah knowing that i’m gonna have the pancake and eggs in the morning i don’t know there’s something very satisfying in that like yeah it’s not even that much you know it’s pancake and the eggs are you know they’re a heritage they’re kind of small but um, It’s just right. You know, it’s just right.
Alison:
So I wish that I could come over there and give you some sourdough. So then you wouldn’t have to worry about making sourdough or just make your massive polenta bread with some different grains and just leave it in your fridge.
Andrea:
Something I forget. Who was I talking to? I think I was talking to Sabrina and Colleen and were like, imagine Allison can make a loaf of bread and they can eat it all week. Can you imagine that? Like we just could like we make a loaf of bread and it doesn’t even make it through one meal. but.
Alison:
Oh you haven’t seen the size of my life of bread that’s true
Andrea:
Um but what we were thinking was also you know um so with more kids comes you know there’s obviously more work and stuff like that but also i’m thinking hey i’m realizing that jacob is learning more and more in the kitchen and i’m going to be able to start actually make this a homeschool chore you know on wednesday to start the sourdough or something. And he asks all the time, can I do this? And so I’m getting better and better about being like, yes, and just stepping out of the way and letting him do it, even if it’s clumsy, because I know the payoff will come later. And, you know, both for myself, selfishly, having him help me out, but also for his private life, being able to do things later, you know. Um so yeah.
Alison:
So before you know it he’ll be making you sourdough and putting up your freezer and and bread bin with it and then you’ll have it for the week
Andrea:
My mom was really good about that with us kids not only having us do things in the kitchen and involving us always from a young age but also she would make things into like like it’s just a regular chore or a task so you think oh I have to scrub the toilet and then you also have oh I have to start the sourdough or whatever I don’t think we created sourdough but whatever it was as the task that she gave us and then it also becomes in a way your school because it’s your you know your home ec you know you’re learning all these amazing skills in the house that obviously are paying off later yeah.
Alison:
Completely oh I think we’ve um we’ve been talking for quite a while is there anything else that you want to add if if not we’ll wrap up I
Andrea:
Think I think I just want to say thank you to our sponsors the patrons who are yeah um the patrons who um subscribe to the monthly patreon thingy i’ll put a link for that in the show notes too because allison and i have been um really good allison i’m quite impressed with us really good at making content and putting it up there um for the patrons to get to enjoy just as an extra thank you for um financially keeping the show sponsored and.
Alison:
We should probably we should probably mention i think this is going to go out before for our next cook-up we have planned for the patrons as well. Yeah. Yeah. So on, what’s the date? It’s November the 12th, isn’t it? We are doing, you look it up and I’ll explain what it is. So on November 12th, we are doing the second of our live Zoom cook-ups, which will be winter-themed. So Andrew and I will be talking about and demoing some recipes that are themed for winter, which you will be able to come on in if you’re a patron and watch live and interact and chat to us or download later and watch or listen to if you can’t get to us live so that’s really quite exciting and i’m looking forward to sharing mine on the 12th of november so if you’re interested in that go take a look at the um patreon feed which we will link in the show notes and um see whether it’s kind of your cup of tea yeah so
Andrea:
Live or later you can hop on with us and and either listen or share maybe you have like a little winter recipe something to share oh my goodness that’d be so cool to hear um and if you can’t be on there at the actual time of course we are recording it and you can listen to it or watch it after the fact but of course we want to see your face so.
Alison:
Yeah indeed okay well then i i shall let you go thank you thank you very much andrew it’s a wonderful episode yeah oh yes go and have your breakfast
Andrea:
All right have an awesome day Alison.
Alison:
Thank you very much. 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 Alison’s at ancestral underscore kitchen. Until next time, we both wish you much fun exploration.
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