#72 – All About Spelt Sourdough

Spelt is a wonderful, economical alternative to wheat. I’ve been baking with it for a decade now and I love its deep, nutty flavour, its flexibility and its digestibility – many people who don’t get on with wheat can enjoy spelt, especially if it’s in a sourdough loaf.

Whether you’ve tried spelt or not, this episode will give you everything you need to know to get the most from this grain in your own kitchen. And we’ll celebrate the podcast’s second ecookbook, Sourdough Spelt Every Day, that distils so much of my baking experience into a guide that’ll get you rustling up all manner of spelt goodies to enjoy!

Get your copy of Sourdough Spelt Every Day here!

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The organ supplements we use and trust – get a 5% discount (and free shipping) on grass-fed supplements, including liver capsules by visiting: https://www.oneearthhealth.com/AncestralKitchen

 

Transcript:

Alison:
Spelt is a wonderful economical alternative to wheat i’ve been baking with it for a decade now and i love its deep nutty flavor its flexibility and its digestibility many people who don’t get on with wheat can enjoy spelt especially if it’s in a sourdough loaf whether you’ve tried spelt or not this episode will give you everything you need to know to get the most from this grain in your own kitchen. And we’ll celebrate the podcast’s second e-cookbook, Sourdough Spelt Every Day, that distills so much of my baking experience into a guide that’ll get you rustling up all manner of spelt goodies to enjoy.

Music:
Music

Alison:
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

Andrea:
Hello, Alison.

Alison:
Hey, Andrea. How are you?

Andrea:
I am well. How are you?

Alison:
Yeah, I’m good. Thank you. I’m down in my little hole ready to record and talk to you about something very dear to my heart today.

Andrea:
I’m super excited about this one. I mean, this has been in the ether for a long time for you and me discussing it. And then all the work you put into the book over this past year. And then getting to see all of that when I put the recipes into the book and doing the layout and stuff has been really cool. I mean, yeah, I’m so excited. Anyways, this is a long coming episode.

Alison:
All that to say. Indeed. So have you eaten today?

Andrea:
Yes, absolutely. I did. I had, don’t laugh, I had chicken noodle soup for breakfast. That’s cool. And it’s the recipe from our first cookbook, actually, except one slight difference. I think in that recipe, I say that I dice everything and then I toast it in the pan and then I add the broth. In this instance, I poached the chicken. Like I took my chicken and I toasted it in the pan. Then I poured water in and poached the chicken in that water. And then I took the chicken out. Excuse me and while the chicken cooled so that I could shred it I diced everything and threw it into the broth so it all boiled in the broth and okay I I really like soups like that because there’s just a different a very light sort of quality to it I don’t know exactly how to describe it but I first ran across doing it that way when I was a kid in this rice cookbook that we have where you would you put in rice and diced vegetables and you boil them all together and I just kind of love the way it tastes when you do that yeah did

Alison:
You just did you just make it for you or did you make a bigger pot.

Andrea:
No, I actually made a pretty big pot and I took a half gallon up to my cousin who just had a baby a couple of days ago. And I took some to our chiropractor and then we had some last night for dinner and then there was just enough left this morning for a bowl for breakfast.

Alison:
Oh, it’s really nice when you just have the right amount left for breakfast.

Andrea:
Oh, I know. It was ideal. And then I don’t have to put anything, like try to, you know, stash it again or whatever.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah.

Andrea:
How about you? Did you eat lunch?

Alison:
Yeah we had a beautiful lunch lamb something that um i’m not that familiar with i don’t i have like memories of my mom cooking roast lamb when i was a child and absolutely hating it and so i kind of avoided lamb for several decades really well yeah but um we bought half a lamb from flavio um last weekend and um i had all the awful with that as well so i posted as you’ll see i’ve posted on discord during the week I made a big sort of pate thing with the brains and the tongue and the cheek and the spleen and the liver and all of that stuff and so we had some of that but then I had all these different cuts which are kind of different from English cuts so I have to get used to how they butcher here compared to how they butcher in the UK and this is the second big kind of chunk I’ve done in the slow cooker last night with a ton of onions half a bottle of red wine.

Alison:
Um and what else did I put in there red wine onions and I put them the joint on the top there were some bones in the joint I just left them all in there and then I put in lots of um time wild time which um someone at the market had collected and sold in little jars which just smelled beautiful and some tomato paste stirred it around with a bit of water left it overnight on low this morning it smelled amazing and then just as it came to lunchtime I cooked a bit of broccoli, and we had the lamb just literally like falling off the bone so tender and doesn’t taste anything like I remember from my childhood that roast lamb just yeah so deep colored so flavorsome with the simple kind of Jew which was, onions and the red wine and the juices of the lamb had gone into it and a slice of spelt sourdough which we’re going to talk about today and some butter on it today not lard oh butter sour cream sounds.

Andrea:
Like a indulgent meal all around

Alison:
Oh it was the meat was so tender and so delicious it’s just completely changing my opinion of lamb it’s beautiful and i can’t wait to have all the rest of the leftovers for you know several days now when.

Andrea:
You bought the half um from flavio did he did you ask him can i have all the organs and

Alison:
Bits he.

Andrea:
Knew that you wanted that

Alison:
Yeah i said well what am i going to get because i kind of want everything and he said well you’re going to get half a kidney half a heart half a spleen because other people also want the awful so whoever had the other half of my lamb had the other half of the organs which is you know something historically i’ve not been used to because usually no one wants the awful it’s just me but um there’s more of a demand you know there’s more of a an alive tradition of awful cooking here in italy than there is in england so i’ve got half of everything half of the lungs as well just half of everything literally oh that’s great yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah i’m happy i’m happy to hear it i mean i know it’s convenient if you’re the only person who wants it you know but from the farmer’s perspective it’s really good if people care about these pieces and are willing to pay for them yeah yeah because it takes as work much work to raise the heart as it does to raise you know yeah the thigh so yeah it’s

Alison:
Scary this.

Andrea:
Brought me water

Alison:
That’s kind yeah.

Andrea:
And it’s in a cute cup too his brother has a little farm as well. And they made us a cup with their farm logo on it.

Alison:
Nice so we’re both quite well fed yeah we’ve.

Andrea:
It and we’re

Alison:
Exactly shall i read we’ve got two more reviews to read we’re trying to keep up with the reviews because there’s so many beautiful ones thank you to everyone who’s left us a review on apple podcasts the first one i’ve got here is from paulette four and she says 10 stars 10 stars as a seasoned woman i love this podcast i always learn so much i look forward to every podcast keep those podcasts coming smiley face succinct and beautiful thank you paulette so.

Andrea:
Kind and 10 stars hello that’s a whole constellation

Alison:
I will.

Andrea:
Read this review from kvass brewer that’s a name oh my goodness If you’ve seen the picture in Sandor’s Art of Fermentation, those huge barrels that they have in Russia and probably other Eastern European places too, but I remember seeing those when I was there. I’m sure you did too.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Okay, the title is Bemystifying Nourishing Traditions. Prior to finding your podcast, I had bought a copy of Nourishing Traditions. I had thumbed through it only to be intimidated by many of the recipes that contained ingredients like whey and processes like stewing something for 24 hours that I was unfamiliar with. The book just sat around looking pretty. Your podcast broke down all of this for me and gave me the confidence to forge ahead. Now my copy of Nourishing Traditions is permanently in my kitchen and is filled with post-its of recipes I want to try or that have become favorites. Thank you. Well, that’s awesome.

Alison:
That’s wonderful. It’s wonderful to hear. You know, that’s not the first time someone’s told me that, that they love Nourishing Traditions, but they’ve just felt overwhelmed by it. And it’s really wonderful that someone has actually thumbed through that and started using it and just like my book i’ve got post-it notes everywhere i.

Andrea:
Know me too yellow ones for the ones that i want to make green ones for the ones that are favorites oh well speaking of cookbooks allison

Alison:
Yeah we have to talk about this i’m.

Andrea:
So excited this is like the presentation of a new child or something

Alison:
Yeah it feels like a baby for sure um because our second cookbook which we’ve been working on for the last kind of six months or, actually for the last decade but I didn’t realize that it was all going to go in a book back then is out and it’s called sourdough spelt every day you can go to our new website we’ve finally got a website just for the podcast which is ancestral kitchen podcast.com so you can go check out our new website and if you put forward slash shop at the end of that or choose the shop option from the menu you will see our beautiful new book sourdough spelt every day alongside our first book meals at the ancestral hearth and maybe if i can get something organized we’ll we’ll organize a way that you could buy both of them at the same time um yeah maybe i can get that done before this goes live, So, yes, we are going to talk all about Spelt sourdough today. And I know that you’ve got questions, Andrew, and some questions have come in from people. So let’s start with wherever you want to start, really.

Andrea:
Well, let’s start with why you even use Spelt and how you kind of got started with it. Because I think that’s a really interesting story.

Alison:
So yeah I wrote about this in the introduction of the book and I called it spelt a love story which frankly it is um when Gable was very very young we were living in Cornwall I was coming back to bread I hadn’t eaten a gluten grain for a decade and I tried a spelt loaf or I tried a loaf I didn’t know it was spelt when it was bought because Rob bought it for me, and I was just like wow this is absolutely amazing I have to bring this bread back into my life I have to learn how to make sourdough and what is this grain and then I realized it was spelt and I’m okay what’s spelt I’ve heard of it before so I started kind of digging and you know I knew from from then really that I wanted to learn to teach myself how to make sourdough and I didn’t want to work with wheat. And so I looked around at what was available and grown relatively close to me, you know, in England and I bought them all. So I tried rye, I tried emma, I tried icorn and I tried spout.

Alison:
And Rob loved the rye and the rye worked really well for Rob. And I still regularly make rye sourdough bread. And I have a course, which is over at the fermentation school, about how you can master rye sourdough bread. And that’s all wonderful and lovely. But I really love the taste of that spelt out of all of the grains. And the other thing that kind of pushed me towards spelt, rather than the other two grains, emma and einkorn which are kind of similar to spelt is that spelt was and is substantially cheaper than emma and einkorn there’s a breakdown in the book of those three grains or two of the grains together and i do it for europe and also for the us and just show you know if you’re baking a certain amount of loaves every week this is how much you’re going to pay for spelt and this is how much more you’re going to be paying for emma and einkorn and that’s a a really important um part of my kitchen economy it was then and it always is so that was a another kind of a push towards spelt the other thing that made me like spelt was that i really found it relatively easy to work with.

Alison:
I think that emma and einkorn are perhaps slightly more difficult and spelt obviously there was a huge learning curve for me because I’d never baked sourdough at all at that point you know I’d never made a any loaf sourdough but I liked the way I could work with spout so it’s kind of a perfect storm with the flavor and the taste and the cost and the flexibility and ease of working with it that’s how I ended up eating every day and making those loaves every week in the kitchen.

Andrea:
Yeah well definitely from you know I got my bag of spelt grains so that I’m ready to to buy the cookbook as it were and um bake with it and I learned just from putting it together and reading it that it is significantly easier to work with than einkorn which I have worked with for a couple years now yeah so

Alison:
Yeah definitely.

Andrea:
All of that you put into the book I mean you you learn from flops and

Alison:
Yeah too many you know.

Andrea:
Accidental things that turned into fortuitous things than accidental things that turn into like okay don’t do that so you put all that in and for For anybody who’s getting the book, you’ll get two copies, the same with the previous one. I should make sure people know this. So when you buy a book, you’ll get two links, and one is a printable version where we put all the photographs in the end um yeah and there’s a lot of beautiful photographs and they’re very helpful when i saw them i was like okay i see what she’s talking about now so they’re really helpful photographs but also beautiful photographs and then in the ebook version we just have them kind of scattered throughout the recipes which is the same way we did it with the other cookbook but that’s so that you can print it without blowing through you know two packets yeah

Alison:
I I really wanted to put those pictures in there because particularly for the cakes, they’re rather particular because the sourdough cakes, they don’t have eggs in them. So it’s important, I think, for me to try to give as much guidance as possible to this is what it should look like at this stage. This is what it should look like at that stage.

Andrea:
Yeah. The crumbly thing with the cakes is really helpful. Seeing the, well, Well, I think just seeing it because a lot of us have literally never seen anything baked with svelte before. So we don’t really know what to expect. Yeah. And just the picture on the cover of the book, which probably everybody is seeing if they have seen this episode. They’ve probably seen that picture floating around. Then showing the sliced bread, that shows how tender and delicious it is. And you also put links to videos as well. So when you get this book, you’re really getting a lot.

Alison:
Yeah, the videos, the videos, again, are there to show process, you know, I wanted to, for example, with the pizza is showing you how I go from that ball of dough to a really thin and crispy pizza, how I use my hands to work it out on the surface. So you can actually see me in my kitchen doing it.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
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Andrea:
What okay i feel like most of us know what wheat is we’ve seen fields of wheat what is

Alison:
So spelt is actually an ancient member of the wheat family. It was first cultivated 5,000 years BC, so the pre-Christian era. And originally, people think it was a cross between a wild goat grass and emmer.

Alison:
So spelt is an ancient grain. It’s something that we class as an ancient grain. I call it that. And by that, I mean one that hasn’t had the same treatment that wheat has in our society. Maybe one day we’ll do an episode on wheat and what happened to it in the Green Revolution and how it was completely changed in order to apparently solve the problems feeding the world in the future.

Alison:
Wheat has been selectively bred for yield, for resistance, and that just hasn’t happened to spelt. And so grains like that are generally termed as ancient grains and spelt is one of those but because it’s part of the wheat family it’s a bit like wheat so it acts like wheat when you work with it but crucially it is different to wheat so the the grain of spelt is genetically purer than wheat it has a different type of gluten and a lower amount of gluten in it than standard wheat and because of that some people can tolerate spelt when they can’t tolerate wheat now spelt isn’t suitable for celiacs because it does have gluten in it but the difference in the type of gluten and the amount of gluten can sometimes make a big difference to people it makes a big difference to Rob because Rob has a long history of a serious wheat allergy and he can eat my spelt bread so that you know that’s a wonderful thing.

Andrea:
And why okay so

Alison:
It it’s.

Andrea:
From the wheat family it hasn’t been you know fiddled

Alison:
With yeah.

Andrea:
It hasn’t been fiddled with um and and um i think uh i’m thinking of a couple of friends of mine who they can’t eat wheat but they actually can eat salt so

Alison:
Yeah you’re totally so you’ve got totally accurate on that so.

Andrea:
I can think of that too yeah and then why should I bake with spelt

Alison:
Um well the first reason why you should bake with spelt is that it just tastes it tastes wonderful it tastes amazing it’s it’s deep it’s rich it’s more flavorful than wheat it has a nutty flavor it’s just it’s a wonderful wonderful flavor I think you should bake with it because it’s an ancient grain which is just generally a nicer thing to have and a nicer thing to put in your body than um in my opinion than wheat it’s easy to handle like i said earlier you know the reason why i stuck with it over some of the other grains was because once you learn how to work with it it’s a it’s a good grain you know it does it behaves it’s relatively easy to to get to understand how to work with it simply and yes it is more expensive than wheat because spelt is lower yielding than wheat because it’s harder to thresh than wheat and like we were just saying because you know wheat’s been commoditized and spelt hasn’t but as i said it’s cheaper than other ancient grains so that’s another reason to bake with it there are lots of reasons to bring it into your kitchen it’s just um it’s a wonderful grain.

Andrea:
Yeah, those are really important points. And it’s important to note, as you kind of indicated previously when you’re talking about Rob, but when animals and plants are selectively bred or even genetically modified, it is typically not for nutrient or flavor content. It is typically for like you said um resistance to you know yeah certain maybe even insecticides or completely or um yield or how fast it grows you know it’s not because it tastes better and i think that was the thing that shocked me the most when i started using einkorn and i know would be the same with spelt i just was floored at how good it tasted and i just didn’t know that the grain was supposed to taste yeah so tasty yeah it’s like supposed to taste like floor but you put a lot of that education on how the spelt’s going to work in your kitchen in the book um and they they are a little bit different than modern wheat and we’ve just gotten really used to the way wheat behaves with these insanely high gluten levels that are not historically accurate, shall we say.

Andrea:
So you put lots of good explanation on things relating to that in the book, although it really doesn’t seem like it’s that complicated when you break it down. But yeah,

Andrea:
Yeah, sometimes you can’t just go trade one cup of wheat for one cup of spout and it doesn’t always work that way.

Alison:
It kind of depends on what you’re used to. You know, if you’re used to baking with white wheat flour, you’re going to find spout, whole grain spout really quite different. But with a good guide and with understanding and recipes that you can use as templates to follow again and again and again, once you get that under your belt and you get those understanding under your belt and that’s that’s really cool yeah.

Andrea:
No absolutely i think somebody coming from working with whole wheat that they’ve been grinding would have an easier time or somebody coming from working with einkorn would find this pretty easy okay so so all that being said how different is spelt to wheat overall

Alison:
Yeah like so I cook with whole grain spout probably 90% of the time in my kitchen so most of my loaves are whole grain and that is very different to working with white wheat but it’s not as different to working with whole grain wheat so the similar the handling of those loaves is similar to how whole grain wheat would be handled because it’s an old grain it’s easier on your body is actually lower in phytic acid as well than wheat it’s been less gm’d it’s been less commoditized um it as we said earlier is different because people who have perhaps ibs problems or problems with wheat can often digest it and also another thing that um i found out recently that i didn’t know thanks to a patreon who first alerted me um spelt is a low fodmap screen and i went and had a look at that when when the patreon told me about that on discord and if you sourdough spelt which obviously is what the book’s all about um spelt sourdough is a low fodmap food so that it’s similar handling but in the way that it interacts with ourselves and in our bodies it is a very different grain and if we have particular.

Alison:
Issues with wheat then we’re going to find when we digest it when we eat it it’s going to react very differently to how we would in our body.

Andrea:
Wow it’s interesting because if you are eating low fodmap you would probably be telling you’d be told don’t eat any bread of any sort yeah but this is a loophole

Alison:
So what can i what what.

Andrea:
Then can i bake with this spelt

Alison:
So, basically, I bake anything with spelt. If you put any recipe in front of me that’s made of any grain, I will just go, oh, okay, I could swap that out for spelt and I could do this. So, really, I’ve come at it in my decade of baking with spelt, just anything, literally anything. So, you can make loaves. You can make simple, straightforward, everyday loaves through to really complex loaves. loaves that have got add-ins in, that have got nuts in, that have got scalds in. So any type of loaf, you can use white spelt or you can use whole grain. As I said, most of the recipes in the book are whole grain, but there are some that include white and or what percentages of white.

Alison:
And you also can mill your flour and use that. And we’ll talk about that a bit later um in the podcast you can make pizza which is an absolute staple in our house and is the base is just so wonderful when you make it with svelte that you really don’t need many toppings like you can put toppings on if you’re in a kind of topping mood but very often i’ll i’ll make svelte sourdough um pizza and i’ll be eating it up there with with gable and rob and they’ll just be like the base is so lovely you know so literally a little bit of lardo or just tomatoes and a tiny bit of pecorino on the top of the pizza and you don’t need anything else because the base is an incredible treat in and of itself that is not so that is not.

Andrea:
True of the pizzas that you would buy like at these um you know, pizza. Yeah. I don’t know, like the cheap, super cheap restaurants or whatever, where people don’t even eat the crust. And also they bury it under so many flavors. And then it’s just not any good.

Alison:
That’s the thing. It seems to be all about the topping these days. Whereas in, you know, we did an episode on pizza way back.

Alison:
If you want to go back into the annals of a wonderful podcast you can find that pizza episode but really pizza especially in italy you know where it came from was about the bread and then a little bit of something on top and you don’t see massively topped pizzas being eaten by italians because it’s about the bread whereas now if you go to like you said a mainstream pizza restaurant the bread is of such poor quality that you need like 15 000 toppings on it yeah to make the pizza nice whereas when you when you focus on the good ingredients and a good process a good fermentation and a good baking of a pizza base the the actual bread is a joy a complete joy in.

Alison:
And of itself delicious i’m going to just keep on talking about pizza so you can make enriched breads that are sweet you can put eggs you can put milk you can put things like that into into breads made of spelt you can make cakes and i’ve made lots of cakes and muffins with spelt you can make pastry from spelt and use that in a savory context as a kind of a meaty pie or you could make for instance apple pie um with your pastry and you can also make pancakes i mean really anything anywhere where you might use wheat in my book and literally in my book you can use spout spout.

Andrea:
Oh i love it okay so sound i’m i’m feeling pretty sold on this yeah i love the idea of it tasty the pizza tasting good the cakes and things like that don’t have to you know blanket them with flavors and things because they’re already delicious so where where do you get your spelt where can i in the u.s get spelt where do people get

Alison:
Spelt yeah okay so I get spelt is grown in Italy and I get my spelt from a mill here and previously I used to buy it as flour which was ground in that mill now I have my mock mill I am buying it as grain and grinding it in my kitchen before I came to Italy when we were back in the UK when Gable was first born there was spelt growing in the UK too in the stillies so I was able to buy spelt from a local mill in england um and really that’s what you know we always suggest to and people listening look at your local suppliers first and you know i know it’s grown in the us i know it’s grown in australia because ellie gets it from a biodynamic farm and uses it and i know it’s grown in italy and in the uk um i’ve been talking to a lot of patrons on the discord forum and you know they’ve gone in and seen oh i found spelt in my local place you know up in canada pictures sent me pictures of packets of spelt flour.

Alison:
From local meals so you know you might be able to find it in your local store go and ask them if you don’t see it um once in i was in florence looking for some spelt flour when we first got here and i literally i was looking on the shelves and there wasn’t any and unbeknownst to me the guy who ran this um restaurant and shop was really really famous he runs a restaurant called called.

Alison:
In Florence which is all about kind of cooking offal originally and I didn’t know anything about him and he came over to me said can I help you and I said I’m looking for spelt flour.

Alison:
And he said oh yeah they’ve got some up in the kitchen I’ll go and get you a bag so he, went to talk to one of his minions and they came back literally they just took some of their flour out of the bag out the back in the kitchen and gave me this big bag of flour and I got home well actually what happened was I went to the checkout and they had a tv screen above the checkout and he had his face on it and I thought that’s the guy that just got that spelt flower for me and it had his name and a book that he so I went home and looked him up and he’s like super famous oh my goodness and he’s giving me my spelt flower anyway that was a diversion um so yeah look for it locally um but if you’re not able to find it locally I know there are, distributors that’s the word um in the u.s for sure and certainly in the uk that you can get it shipped to you so azure for example in the u.s has um spelt flour and other meals like hayden mills and bob’s red mill they have spelt flour so you can if you can’t find it locally you can order it in from a more national supplier yeah.

Andrea:
Perfect yeah azure was where i found it i haven’t even looked in grocery stores, but I will say, I don’t know if it’s the same over there, but typically if you look in a grocery store for something like coconut sugar or organic brown sugar or einkorn, it’s really expensive in a grocery store. Like you would not take it home and make a loaf with it. I don’t know why, but they’re just like, oh, this is a boutique product, but you can usually get things from Azure for really reasonable or go like you said to a mill. And when I looked in my area, I found a woman who was growing it. I think that their farm actually contracts with Azure now, but they’re growing it on the east side of our mountains. And she sounded kind of like Will Harris, where she said one year, she was just looking at her fields of wheat and it was commodity wheat and it was GMO wheat. And she just turned to her, I don’t know, husband, son, whoever she’s farming with. And she said, We’re going to grow ancient grains. I’m done with this. I was like, wow, that’s kind of cool.

Alison:
Good honor.

Andrea:
Yeah. So if I say I’m listening to this episode, I’ve never baked a sourdough before ever. And now you’re talking about spelt sourdough. Is this too much or can I start?

Alison:
Well, I would say I started with spelt. I had not made a wheat sourdough before I started with spelt.

Alison:
So if you haven’t made sourdough before and you don’t want to bake with wheat don’t bake with wheat just start with spell it’s not difficult and like i said the handling is like wheat it’s not going to be something that will give you you know if you get a good guide it’s not going to be something that will give you huge problems the book gives really really detailed processes and baking tips and guides plus at the back a load of resources on how to create a starter so if you haven’t created a starter before you’ll find through the book through the resources lots of resources to help you with that and they’ll there’s lots of information on there about proofing what to look for how to stretch and fold your bread how to.

Alison:
Move from each stage to the next and each of the recipes has that in there as well how you know when to move from the first phase to the second phase how you know when to put it into the oven so there there’s a guide the book is a guide and it could be picked up by someone who’s never made sourdough before and wants to start with spelt because I kind of know because that that was where I was you know those years back when gable was a little boy that’s where i was and so i tried to ensure that anyone who who’s in that position and wants to give it a go i want to encourage them because it’s a wonderful grain and sourdough bread is wonderful so um there’s as much information as possible as i could put in there to help guide people who are unfamiliar.

Andrea:
It’s almost an advantage if somebody hasn’t picked a sardine anyways. It’s like, well, good. You have nothing to compare it to.

Alison:
Yeah. You just learn with spelt. You and spelt grow together.

Andrea:
Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. And you did put a lot of detail in there. So it really does not leave you hanging on any point. And are the books in, I know you referred to this before, but are they whole grain or white?

Alison:
Yeah. so most of them are whole grain because i much prefer to work with whole grain some of the loaves like i think the milk the milk kefir loaf and the cakes they are 50 percent white um now if you don’t want to use white flour or you’re milling your own and you don’t want to actually sieve it out because that’s a quite a difficult process you could just try all the recipes 100 percent whole grain you know the if you put more white in it you’re going to get more of a rise than you would from whole grain but that’s not the be all and end all although instagram may think you make you think that it is it’s just not and so any of the recipes in there could be made 100% whole grain and frankly any of the recipes could be made with half white if you want if you prefer that or if you want to change it up you know a couple of times well.

Andrea:
Maybe there there’s somebody who’s trying to use up their stash of white spelt or something yeah throw it in

Alison:
And completely they’re Yeah.

Andrea:
Okay. Um all right so yeah okay that kind of answers my next question which was can i use the book if i’m going to grind my own grain

Alison:
Yes you can yeah and what you do have to remember though is, fresh um freshly ground grain needs more water all grains are different um and really no baking book can ever be 100 prescriptive because your grains are different each season in the same area let alone you know my grain that’s been grown in Italy to your grain that’s been grown over there so it’s important to to experiment if you’re using freshly ground grain I’ve given guides on what to look for you know in the recipes so you know rather than saying this is how much you need to use water this is how much you need to use flour just go with it I’ve tried with the inclusion of the videos with the inclusion of the pictures I’ve tried to explain this is what to look for this is how to know if your consistency is good and therefore that will help you if you’re grinding your own grain to know how much extra water you may need to add in okay.

Andrea:
Because i then i could just see this is the look that i want i need a little more moisture

Alison:
Yeah yeah exactly and i’ve noticed you know starting to mill my own spell that it does need more water exactly the same is the right you need more water and it just takes a few goes for you to understand how the flower is going to work yeah with with your particular flower and to try the water and you know that one was just a bit too stiff and it didn’t rise much because of that so the next one i’ll put in another you know 30 milliliters of water and therefore it’s a bit better.

Andrea:
Yes. And well, I was going to say, this is definitely something that I learned by trying to write recipes down. And it’s something that you realize is missing from our general food culture, which is, you know, you want to say, we’ll put in enough water until it’s like a wet dough until it looks just right or something. It’s kind of hard to explain sometimes but people are accustomed to very like with a lot of commoditized foods it’s super predictable all the time so you can say put in exactly this amount put in exactly that amount and it’ll come out exactly this way every time 100% of the time

Alison:
And I think I think white wheat flour if you buy it from a supermarket probably is yeah it has the ability to be more prescriptive about but you know when you’re buying something other than the wheat and you’re buying it from a local supplier and potentially you’re also, milling your spelt then it is going to be very very different um when i wrote the book i did i wasn’t milling i hadn’t bought that mock mill yet so all the recipes are written with flour that I bought from a mill in mind, but now I’m starting to mill, I can see the difference. If you want to see the reasons why I bought the mock mill and my mock mill, you can go to ancestralkitchen.com or slash mill, and I will put that link in the show notes in case people are curious on that.

Andrea:
No, I think that’s good because you definitely, I mean, the conversation we had in the patron group, I think everybody was like, all right, I’m going to go buy a meal now. It just happened. Yeah.

Alison:
It’s completely changed my life.

Andrea:
All sold on it. So yeah. Okay, good. Yeah. You put a lot of detail in there where you said, hey, you know, in the winter you might do this. In my cold kitchen, it’s like this. In my warm kitchen, it’s like this. So it’s just important to be tactile with our food. and i think this is a good bid for doing the same recipe over and over and over

Alison:
Completely i mean that’s how i’ve learned that all these recipes in this book i have cooked unbelievable amount of times and that’s how how i’ve learned and you know when i moved from england to italy i had to learn again because i’ve got a different flower i’ve got different things going on in my kitchen’s different temperatures it’s different humidity so that that’s the way to really make it become part of your being part of yourselves. It’s just to do it over and over again.

Andrea:
Yeah. Hey there thank you for being a listener of the ancestral kitchen podcast it means so much to allison and i when you post a review on apple or spotify or share about the podcast in your stories or send us a message and let us know what it means to you which is hopefully something good you can also sponsor the podcast through our patreon account and help rob buy weird gadgets to edit out my coughs and microphone bumps in the background We have a variety of different levels you can choose from and a bunch of different benefits you can enjoy, ranging from additional interviews to video content and downloadable goodies. Check it out at patreon.com slash ancestral kitchen podcast. What do I have left on my list? Oh, this is a good question, and I don’t think you’ve answered it yet. If i have a wheat sourdough starter can i put that in the spelt recipes or do i need to start a new starter

Alison:
Yeah no completely absolutely fine to use um yeah i’m not prescriptive about what starter you use i um maintain a rice starter in my kitchen and anyone who’s seen my course um 10 tips on creating and maintaining a sourdough starter or heard me talk about starters at any point will know that I use a rice starter whole grain rye because I just think it’s a powerhouse for starters so normally I use a rice starter in my spelt breads I have used both rye and spelt starters for these recipes so you could use a rice starter you could use a wheat starter you could use a spelt starter you could start a spelt starter if you want you could use whatever starter you want what’s important over and above that is that your starter is active and strong and there are tips for how to make how to achieve that and how to know that that’s the case in the book.

Andrea:
You also had that really cool graphic in there where you drew out how to take care of a starter, which is, you know, like you said, it doesn’t matter what starter, it is that information is solid. So that was really nice for me because I’m very visual and I liked seeing it. I know you’re visual too.

Alison:
Yeah, I like drawing that. So that was why you made it.

Andrea:
Yeah. Well, that’s really fun. So that’s a really handy page in there.

Alison:
I think that starters can be really complicated and if you just put it in a diagram with pictures sometimes it just clicks in a way that the words don’t you know yeah.

Andrea:
No totally um but if I want the starter to be totally spelt can I switch like how do I

Alison:
Switch oh yeah yeah so no problem so just start feeding it spelt I would use whole grain not white because whole grain flour generally is more active and literally in a few days it will be converted if you want to be more measured and do it gradually whereas I just be like oh bung spelt in there um you could mix in 50% spelt along with 50% of your other flour for a few days and then you could up that percentage gradually over a few days but you know after five or six feeds there’ll be such a small percentage of the other original flour in it that you’ll have a spelt starter.

Andrea:
Okay all right um cool so then I think this is this is doable so what all now I actually know because I put it in but all you tell me what all is what did you put in the book you kind of alluded to oh I make everything with spelt and you said sometimes it sounded very delicious so what all is in there

Alison:
Yeah okay so let’s as you talked as you said the word delicious let’s start with the recipes so there are 11 recipes in the book which um each one of them is a kind of a lesson in itself and can be made many times to learn about that particular type of bread so there’s an everyday loaf to start with which is a very um simple spelt loaf to start with so if you haven’t made spelt before you haven’t made sourdough before you want to start with the everyday loaf or if you just want to knock a loaf out and you want something simple then the everyday loaf is a go-to loaf for um spelt there’s a loaf cover um okay yes that is the one on the cover we changed the cover a few times so i’m trying to remember which one’s on the cover yeah we had we had a big vote in in the patreon as to which was the best cover yeah.

Andrea:
I mean it was unanimous that’s on the cover yeah

Alison:
That’s the one on the cover um after that the next loaf i put in was a loaf with scald so um that everyday loaf that i just talked about if you don’t eat it relatively quickly within like three or four days it can depending on your humidity um have a tendency to go stale just like you know any breads can the way that i found to get around this is to use a scald in your loaf and a school just means a portion of the flour is held back and mixed with water and cooked like a porridge and added into the loaf, So there’s a recipe for a spelt loaf that uses the scald, which will give you a softer crumb and also enable that bread to last longer and still be moist, you know, after three, four days. That’s in there.

Alison:
Then there’s the loaf that I got invited to a dinner at Flavio, my farmer’s house, a couple of years ago. And I wanted to take a loaf because obviously he was doing all the meat, being my farmer um and so i wanted to do something quite special so i came up with a loaf that’s got chocolate malt in it and hazelnuts and it’s just a beautiful loaf that one’s in there um then there’s there’s a a not sourdough recipe because there is a naturally leavened bread that is risen with milk kefir so i will guide you through how to create a starter using milk kefir and then we’ll use that starter to make a loaf and that loaf is really special because it has a different flavor profile to the other sourdough loaves so most of the other sourdough loaves you’ve got that kind of strong sourdough flavor whereas the milk kefir loaf because milk kefir is dominant in lactobacillus rather than the other sourdough bacteria acetic you know gives and acetic flavor then this loaf is just smooth and creamy flavor because it’s got that lacto flavor as opposed to the more vinegary flavor and it’s really fun to see how you know live milk kefir can create you a.

Alison:
Loaf of bread um that’s one that and we talked a little bit about you know how i first worked with spell and the failures and and what i didn’t say was that you know i had people who helped me through that period i had a mentor particular mentor that i found and i worked with him to um make that bridge and he said to me i’m making this bread milk kefir and i was like really how do you do that and so he taught me that bread really and then I’ve gone on and made it my own and I’m still making it many many years after um having those wonderful interactions with him, So that loaf’s in there. Then there are pancakes, which you do not have to use eggs to make, which are wonderful. One can be 100% spelt or you can play around and put different flour in and you can eat them sweet or savoury. There’s the pizza, which when I first put that recipe out into the world, I remember that there was a wonderful woman called Lucy who was cooking up a lot of my recipes. And she wrote on my blog this is the best pizza I’ve ever eaten and you know when I talked about it earlier it is really amazing great review and yeah I when I read that you can imagine how happy I was I was like yes someone made it and they love it it’s wonderful and.

Andrea:
Knowing you’re it’s not just you that thinks it’s so good exactly

Alison:
Yeah so that recipe’s in there along with kind of lots of ideas about how best to bake it the options for baking pizza um how you can transfer the pizza there’s videos like you said on how to um actually shape the pizza that one’s in there there’s a picture.

Andrea:
Of baby Gabriel

Alison:
From quite a while ago when he had short hair kneading the toe, there’s also um a loaf that we make quite a lot because we render our own lard we have lard cracklings left over and I came up with a kind of a spin on a traditional Italian loaf that would have been made with the cracklings and so that sourdough spelt lard cracklings loaf is in there there’s also a ball which was inspired by the Scottish oat ferment suins that I make which comes up with a wild fermented porridge and i put that porridge into the bread and made a ball with it and it it changes the consistency of the dough and it changes the crust and it changes the flavor and it’s just that’s a wonderful loaf.

Alison:
That one’s in there too. And then we’ve got the cakes. So there are two cakes in the book, which both of them really were developed to give to Gabriel, who can’t eat eggs, my son who can’t eat eggs. So both of those are risen literally just with sourdough. There’s a carrot cake, which is beautiful with almonds and cinnamon on the top. And then there’s a chocolate cake chocolate and banana cake the banana softens the crumb and that one you can make single kind of single sandwich and just enjoy it like that or I’ve made it a couple of times and there’s a picture of the book of it made a picture in the book of it made as a double kind of sandwich loaf and sandwiched together with whipped cream that’s rather the luxurious nice.

Andrea:
On that on the one on the pretty plate that one or the

Alison:
Yes that’s right yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah oh man exactly

Alison:
So that’s yummy and um then the other recipe that’s in there which is one that um you made me put in there is a pastry for a pie so a pie pastry recipe using lard or butter and sourdough and spelt and it’s written, for a savoury pie and there’s actually when I was testing it I had a recipe that I quite liked for the filling that Gabriel liked and so I put that in the book too and that uses sourdough discard to thicken the filling so there’s lots of.

Alison:
Information on pastry in there and you could adapt that recipe to make it sweet too if you wanted to put a little bit of sweetener in it and like I said use it for apple pie or something like that.

Alison:
So those are my beautiful baby recipes that are all in one place in this wonderful book. And then, as you’ve kind of talked about and I’ve talked about there, there’s loads of other stuff in the book. And there’s all those photographs that you wonderfully organized to explain things. So there’s information about spout in general. There’s, as I talked about earlier, the economics of buying spout compared with other grains. So you can actually see the cost of the grain and how different that is to other ancient grains.

Alison:
There is all manner of advice on baking equipment, tins, oven information, everything that you need and don’t need in order to bake sourdough. There’s information on proofing, on proofing setup, there’s information on scoring, on storage for your breads. There’s ingredient information. So there’s information about your flowers, your water, the starter. There’s guides for how you know so you know how to move from one stage to the next in the process, I wrote a document for the book that is eight tips for better sourdough baking so there’s some general sourdough baking advice in there and then there’s tons of resources links for other articles that I’ve written courses videos really there’s there’s a heavy wealth as well as those 11 recipes of extra support, guidance, inspiration, tips, all that kind of other stuff around it.

Andrea:
Hey, you washing the dishes. Been there. You’ve heard Alison and I talk over and over about her love of rye sourdough bread. Well, I might actually call it an obsession, but that’s neither here nor there. Now you can make Alison’s rye sourdough in your own kitchen with her as your teacher.

Andrea:
And she’s a really good teacher. Rye is economical, it’s delicious, and full of nutrients and low in gluten. There’s a reason why it has been a darling of bread bakers for centuries. Make it into sourdough as Allison will show you in her course, Rye Sourdough Bread, Mastering the Basics. And you’ve got an amazing, tasty, and nutritious staple in your kitchen. It’s traditional, and it’s nutritional. In this course, you’ll learn everything there is to know about how she creates and maintains her rye sourdough starter, all about whole grain sourdough rye, including the key differences between baking with rye and wheat, how to make two loaves, an everyday rye sandwich bread, and a delicious Russian-style dark rye loaf, and what to do with your sourdough discard, including video walkthroughs for sourdough pancakes and a tasty sweet spiced cake head to www.ancestralkitchen.com slash rye you also put in a page that i um i i had to call you to

Alison:
Ask you what.

Andrea:
The details were on it so that i could fill it out properly the page but um tell me about the mentorship that you offer so people who just um maybe want to hand hold a little more or they’re kind of working on a more complex problem maybe or they just love the idea of walking through it with you personally yeah

Alison:
So so i get asked quite a lot will you help me with my spout with my sour dough you know i’m doing this and i’ve got a problem and i and i don’t know what’s going wrong I don’t know if I’ve overproofed it I don’t know if I’ve underproofed it I don’t know if I didn’t mix it well enough I don’t know if it’s my starters that’s that’s wrong and really I created the mentorship so that I could connect with people actually in their kitchens and get them when they’ve got those issues and try and guide them through it because I’ve had all of those issues I’ve had all of those doubts and and I’ve had moments where I’ve, I just, I’m so overwhelmed with not knowing what to do next or not knowing what’s gone wrong and would have really benefited from some advice.

Alison:
So the way the mentorship works is we connect over Zoom. So we’ve got the option of having the camera and you talk one-on-one with me. And I set up two options to kind of make it easy for people. The first one is called Get Going, which is four sessions and that’s a complete hand holding through sourdough baking in that’s in your kitchen and we have four meetings every week for a month to literally get you going so we take you from oh I don’t know what to do with my starter I can’t get my starter going or I don’t know what bread to start with or help me with this all this kind of the struggle the overwhelm the idea is that I take that away from you and I move you to a place where you’re turning out loaves that you’re proud of and so I answer questions I got I can guide you through creating and maintaining your starter we’ll plan your loaves together I’ll keep you accountable so you actually do it you know between our calls and then I’ll troubleshoot your problems you can come back the following week and say look I made this loaf and it’s nice because it’s done this but look it’s got this holes in it at the bottom or it hasn’t risen well or I think I cooked it too much and I can actually see your loaf and say ah okay okay what happened here let’s try this let’s try this and then you go away and try it again so that’s the four sessions together.

Alison:
Um there’s also the option of doing troubleshooting one-off sessions so that’s when you know we we’ve got a kind of a roadblock we’ve hit a wall in our baking and we don’t really know why just like I are saying is it our starter is it we’ve overproofed it is it we’ve underproofed it.

Alison:
If you want some hand holding through that it’s a one-off call designed to get you over an issue or help you finesse something that you’re not happy with.

Alison:
So like you said, there’s a page in the book that puts out those two options. And if people want to go and look at it now or when they’re listening to this, they can go to ancestralkitchen.com forward slash shop and you’ll see the book in there and all my other courses. But you’ll see two options there. One’s for the get going with ancient grain sourdough and the other one is for the troubleshoot ancient grain sourdough.

Andrea:
So the information on the mentorship stuff is right on that page? you’re

Alison:
Saying that’s right yeah you can you can you can see all of the things that will happen and and how it works all there yeah yeah.

Andrea:
That’s nice because I’m thinking about how you said I mean I know you and I’ve talked at length about this sometimes on the podcast and sometimes just when we’re chatting about how much time you spent in those forums and back and forth people really helping you drill down into details and and now you’re referring to you know this guy who helped mentor you and now you’re writing a cookbook you know what I mean like this yeah you can take mentorship and go you know really far with it yeah which is amazing so that’s cool somebody could take this and say hey I’ve never you had never baked sardo you hadn’t even eaten grains in 10 years yes

Alison:
Yeah so lately.

Andrea:
And you got to the point you’re at now so that’s fantastic

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Well, I know I said it ate, but I am starting to get hungry again. So what recipe should you start with in the book? What would you say? Like, I have a bag of grains upstairs. I have a meal. Colleen also has a bag of grains. We’re going to make something. What should we start with?

Alison:
Okay so i would say if you’re if the person listening is asking that question i know that you’re not a beginner but if you’re a beginner i would say start with that everyday spelt recipe the one that i talked about at the beginning of the recipe section i think i.

Andrea:
Would want to start with there anyways like well

Alison:
You could start with my.

Andrea:
Way from the beginning you know

Alison:
Because then you’ll you’ll understand how spelt feels you’ll you’ll feel it working yeah feel it i want to see how much water it needs you’ll see what happens to it as it’s proofing you’ll see you know when you put it in the tin how much it’s going to rise in that tin you’ll see all of that so clearly through a simple recipe and so you’ll be building foundations that will help you you know move on much more quickly into more complicated recipes so yeah okay i think i think you and colleen then to start with the everyday spelt i would say if if people have baked with spelt before, then just explore the book i mean pizza obviously is wonderful so you could start with a pizza or if you if you’ve got something coming up you need a cake for then have a have a few goes with one of the cake recipes and play around with that it’s just yeah well exactly it’s um go go with your go with your joy once you’ve got that basic um knowledge and experience and intimacy with the flour that you’re using then really any of the recipes or any spin-offs on any of the recipes that you want to conjure up yourself it’s just it’s endless absolutely i actually.

Andrea:
Think i kind of want to do pizza well obviously obviously i mean you really sold us hard on the pizza yeah

Alison:
I can’t can’t help it love it.

Andrea:
Here’s a question i should have asked before but i didn’t think about it now but um thinking of colleen made me think of it she’ll be using a gluten-free sourdough starter is that gonna be fine yeah

Alison:
That will be fine yeah um the result might be different to how it would if you be using a spelt starter or a starter with gluten in it but the main thing is if it’s strong and it’s got that bacteria in it’s going to do the work it might yeah act differently to one of the gluten grains but but it will work yeah.

Andrea:
I mean you’ve seen i don’t know if you saw her loaf in the patron group sourdough so i know she’s got a bump in sourdough starter and i’m assuming this book is 150 dollars of everything that’s in it about how much is it really so

Alison:
The book is the Same price as our first e-cookbook, $12. So Meals at the Ancestral Hearth was $12. I think just keeping it simple, this one is $12 too. I don’t know if it’s got more pages than the Meals at the Ancestral Hearth. It’s got a lot of pages. It’s got a lot of pages. It’s pretty long.

Andrea:
Actually, let me jump over right now to the document.

Alison:
It is a lot of pages.

Andrea:
70 pages on the printed version.

Alison:
Okay and then the e-book version is going to be longer do you think it’ll.

Andrea:
Probably be twice as long at least yeah

Alison:
So it’s a lot of pages yeah.

Andrea:
And i think the past the last 15 or 20

Alison:
50 photos yeah.

Andrea:
The last 15 pages are beautiful photos so you don’t have to print those pages that’s why we formatted it

Alison:
That way yeah but i feel like the the engagement we’ve had with meals at the ancestral half has been really really wonderful from listeners from patrons and people who bought it who sent us pictures of you know they printed it out and put it on their kitchen shelf the meals that people have been making from it and I I hope that this book will just be the same so thank you to everyone who’s supporting us through buying our first cookbook and if you’re interested in spelt then feel free to come and support us again and get you know, a load of my spelt baking experience and make yourself some delicious spelt loaves.

Andrea:
I mean, if you’ve never even considered working with spelt before, This book is, I mean, speaking as somebody who went and bought a 25-pound bag of grains, this book will sell you on the idea of Spelt.

Alison:
And, yeah, you can find it, as we said earlier, on our new site, which is AncestralKitchenPodcast.com. Is this episode the.

Andrea:
Like, unveiling of that website? Oh, man, so many things happening on this episode.

Alison:
Exactly. so yeah our beautiful new website which has been i don’t know how long has it been in the workings six months probably we’ve.

Andrea:
Been busy shall i say cracking the whip at rob now

Alison:
I’m just yeah oh man working on stuff so yeah there is an option in there for shop go there and you can find both the books you can see the spelt book and i uploaded a lot of really beautiful photos to that page and there’s some text that will describe the book to you further and we’ll put that link in the show notes so you can just click and be there oh.

Andrea:
Man this is so exciting Allison this book has just been needed for a long time I know when I’ve talked to people who love working with ancient grains and they say I love spelt but they just there’s there’s not a lot of it’s hard to find 100% resources I remember that with your rye

Alison:
Yeah you.

Andrea:
Making the 100% rye loaves and Sabrina said Everywhere I look, there’s rye loaves, but they’re half wheat, half rye. And it’s because it takes dedication to the process to get to know those little idiosyncrasies in the grain and to be familiar with it. And you really took the time to do that. Hence, you were able to produce these 100% spelt, 100% rye recipes for us, which I’m so excited that we have this spelt book now. Super, super excited.

Alison:
Thank you. It’s been such a reward in so many ways in the health of my family and in the organization of my kitchen and really in the flavor. It’s just it’s been a joy throughout it all really has.

Andrea:
I would love, love, love to see, like you said, people were sending us pictures and patrons post pictures of things they made. But if people share pictures of things, it’d be cool if there is a place on your website where we could share them. Pictures of things people made out of the book.

Alison:
That’d be like a yeah page yeah that’s a nice idea on the.

Andrea:
List for rob

Alison:
Yeah i should get rob onto that yeah after he’s finished the website and done washing up i’ll get him on that one we’ll.

Andrea:
Give him a minute to recover and then be like okay i’ll have another project for you okay he’s he’s such a good sport

Alison:
Thank you for all your great questions andrea it’s been a lovely episode for.

Andrea:
Answering them this was lovely and i feel i feel so confident now and i’m very excited to make my spelt pizza

Alison:
Oh get going get going enjoy bye for now thank you allison 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.

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