#104 – Baking with Ancient Grains

Download the free, 30-page guide Baking with Ancient Grains here

Alison has just released a free 30-page guide to baking with ancient grains and this companion podcast episode will give you everything you need to know to bring the world of ancient grain baking into your own kitchen.

We’ll define an ancient grain, we’ll talk about why they’re different to modern wheat and how that change happened, Alison will share why she believes ancient grains are so important in our modern world and then talk about how you can bring them into your own baking.

We’ll give examples of gluten and gluten-free ancient grains and explain how you can bake with them. We’ll also talk through the five delicious ancient grain recipes that are in Alison’s free guide which you can get by navigating to https://ancestralkitchen.com/ancientgrains

I addition to all of this, there is also an after show for supporters the podcast where we answer a listener question about when to soak, sprout and ferment your grains and what the differences are between the three options.

Let’s dive in…

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

One Earth Health make the grass-fed organ supplements we use and trust. Get 15% off your first order here and 5% off all subsequent orders here.

Resources:

Free, 30-page ebook Baking with Ancient Grains

The Ancestral Kitchen Podcast Guide to Milling Your Own Flour

Spelt Cookbook

Alison’s Rye Course with 10% off automatically applied

Episode 41 – Wholegrain Sourdough Rye Bread

Episode 72 – All About Spelt Sourdough

Episode 82 – Home Milling Flour for the Best Bread!

The Man Who Tried to Feed the World (PBS documentary on Noman Borlaug, originator of The Green Revolution)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Transcript:

Alison:
[0:00] I’ve just released a free 30-page guide to baking with ancient grains and this companion podcast episode will give you everything you need to know to bring the world of ancient grain baking into your own kitchen. We’ll define an ancient grain, we’ll talk about why they’re different to modern wheat and how that change happened, I’ll share why I believe ancient grains are so important in our modern world and then talk about how you can bring them into your own baking. I’ll give examples of gluten and non-gluten ancient grains and explain how you can bake with them. I’ll also talk through the five delicious ancient grain recipes that are in my free guide which you can get by navigating to ancestralkitchen.com forward slash ancient grains. In addition to all of this there is also an after show for supporters of the podcast where I answer a listener question about when to soak, sprout, and ferment your grains, and what the differences are between the three options. Let’s dive in. Piano plays softly.

Andrea:
[1:09] Welcome to the Ancestral Kitchen podcast.

Alison:
[1:13] I’m Alison, a European town dweller living in England.

Andrea:
[1:16] And I’m Andrea, living on a family farm in northwest Washington State, USA.

Alison:
[1:22] Pull up a chair at the table and join us as we talk about eating, cooking and living with ancestral food wisdom in a modern world kitchen.

Music:
[1:31] Music

Andrea:
[1:41] Hello Alison. Good afternoon.

Alison:
[1:44] Hello, hello Andrea. Good morning to you. Good very early morning to you.

Andrea:
[1:48] Yeah, early morning for me Nice afternoon, what’s it, cold over there, sunny?

Alison:
[1:54] Yeah, cold, cold, cold Okay, I’m waiting for spring sometime soon, hopefully Please come spring Oh my goodness.

Andrea:
[2:02] I was outside yesterday And I could hear a chickadee somewhere And I could hear, which we have chickadees all winter And I could hear a squirrel in a tree And it just felt spring a little promise of spring i closed my eyes and didn’t see the snow everywhere

Alison:
[2:22] Oh you still got snow wow oh.

Andrea:
[2:25] Yeah and you know the kids are sledding so our driveway is a big long steep hill and gary actually scraped it down with our skid steer so it is a perfectly smooth long it’s like a roller coaster basically um so the kids have been skating and or not skating but um sledding sledding down the hill so yeah it’s been lots of fun the pros of living on a hill is you can sled down the cons are you have to hike up

Alison:
[2:54] Yeah so.

Andrea:
[2:57] Anyways well look at us surviving um did you eat before we got on

Alison:
[3:02] Yeah i had some lunch i had a lunch that was leftovers which sounds boring but it but it wasn’t boring never.

Andrea:
[3:09] Um leftovers sounds like less dishes and i like all those things

Alison:
[3:13] Leftover um chicken liver pate which was made yesterday um i used to make my chicken liver pate or any liver pate in big batches and it took like the whole morning to fry all the onions and fry all the bacon and fry all the liver and then let it cool down and and and i just figured actually i can do it in smaller batches so yesterday morning, it’s kind of like a tag team effort um i chopped some mushrooms and onion and put a few pieces of bacon in the pan left it and rob cooked them i left the liver out which i defrosted overnight, i explained to him empty the pan when you’ve done the liver and the mushrooms and the when you’ve done the mushrooms the onion and the bacon then put the liver in leave it to cool a few processes here ready blend it up with these spices that i’ve already ground and he did all that bit um that was yesterday anyway so we had leftover liver pate today.

Alison:
[4:07] Which is one of the ways Gabriel will eat pate and liver, which is great. And we had spelt sourdough bread with it with butter on. And we had leftover cabbage, which we heated up in a little bit of stock to make it extra nice. And also we had leftover kind of like a hummus. I’ve been trying to bring some pulses into our diet slowly, but we’ve had problems digesting them, Gabriel. I mean, when we did GAPS, we certainly noticed as soon as we brought the pulses back in, he was very ill. Yeah, I remember that. So I was trying to find some chickpeas that didn’t have the skins on. Because you could get them in Italy all the time, but I hadn’t seen them here. And then, Nicole…

Andrea:
[4:54] Wait, you can buy them without the skins on?

Alison:
[4:56] Yeah, you can buy them without the skins on, yeah. So you can buy them in Italy, and they’re called cecci, which is chickpea. De corticata, which means they’ve had their skin taken off.

Alison:
[5:04] Corticated. And so I was looking for kind of hull-less chickpeas in the shop, didn’t see any of them. And then Nicole, who’s a podcast patron who I just spent last weekend with because we had a UK meet-up for all the patrons in Europe, she stayed an extra day at mine. We went into the shop and she was nosing all the pulses and found a packet which says Chana Dahl on it, which is the Indian name, and that is chickpeas de corticata without the hulls on it. But it’s called Chana Dahl. In this country because i guess it’s branded as the indian name of it huh so i bought those and i attempted to make a hummus with them but i wanted to make it as kind of anti-nutrient as possible as anti-anti-nutrient as possible so i um soaked the chickpeas in warm water and an acid medium for two days changing the water and acid medium on the on the um after day one so it was done twice in a warm in the proofing box they were warm and then I cooked them in the instant pot now that was one of the things I really wanted to do since I got the instant pot because in the book called Plant Paradox by Dr Stephen Gundry he talks about lectins and we have had quite a journey with Gable with lectins that book was very influential in his healing path.

Alison:
[6:29] And he said that lectins, the only way he knew to remove lectins from pulses was to pressure cook them. So I thought, right, I’m going to do this. I’m going to take these chickpeas and I’m going to pressure cook them. So I put them in an instant pot. I had…

Music:
[6:42] Music

Alison:
[6:47] Yeah, exactly.

Andrea:
[6:48] Pressure cooking them.

Alison:
[6:50] Apparently, it’s the only way he knows of getting rid of listening.

Andrea:
[6:52] Is it because of the high temperature?

Alison:
[6:56] I don’t know. Interesting, eh? Wow. So I put way too much water in, but it doesn’t matter because you just drain the water away afterwards. I cooked them in the Instapot for 35 minutes. And then I, rather than paying through the nose for tahini, because that’s super extensive in the store, I looked at it, I was like, oh my gosh, you want me to pay that much for tahini? I bought sesame seeds and I soaked them overnight in water because I thought, well, that’s going to help with the anti-nutrients in the sesame seeds. And then I put the cooked chickpeas that were cold and the sesame seeds and I roasted beetroot and three cloves of garlic. And so that’s all lovely and sweet. I put that in there as well and squeezed the garlic out like toothpaste from the cloves.

Alison:
[7:45] And some olive oil and some ground-up coriander seed. I should have put lemon in as well. I will do next time. And whizzed it all up. Of course, the sesame seeds, as I thought like an hour before I blended it, just stay completely whole. Okay, so it’s not quite tahini. But it looks pretty because it’s purple from the beetroot and it’s studded with sesame seeds. Oh, wow. You have to chew it to try to break down the sesame seeds in your mouth. But it’s absolutely delicious It was really gentle Sounds really good I sometimes struggle with hummus Because it’s so, pow you know the garlic and the lemon and just so in your face and i’m i’m not really into in your face food much anymore um but this is really gentle the chickpeas feel gentle the beetroot makes it sweet the coriander is like a gentle lemon um and the garlic because it’s roasted and there’s not much of it isn’t like forward and um so far we seem to have been much better with it than we have been with pulses in the past so i’m really hopeful that was a kind of a long story i’m really hopeful that um this might be something that i can kind of hone a bit, and repeat and might be a way that we can start to bring pulses back into our diet which would be, wonderful that’s so.

Andrea:
[9:07] We do the same thing as you because i also looked at the price of tahini And it was like, I don’t know, $15 for a little jar or something. Yeah, exactly. And so we get the big bag of sesame seeds. I never thought about soaking them first, but I blend them on their own first, like separately. So I blend them up and then I put them in with the beans.

Alison:
[9:35] So they’re like a powder by the time you put them in with the pulses, are they?

Andrea:
[9:39] No, they have some fat in them, so they become like a paste when

Alison:
[9:45] I burn them. A paste. Ah. Mm-hmm. Okay, and you’re doing it in what? What do you do that in?

Andrea:
[9:50] Oh, just the Vitamix. That’s the only thing I have. So a food processor would probably be easier, but I don’t have one. But… You could add a drizzle of oil too, since it’s going in to hummus and it doesn’t have to be particularly thick anyways, you know, because it is really, really thick, the sesame paste.

Alison:
[10:14] I’m not so hot with wet grinding because I’ve got my food processor that the amount of sesame seeds I did wouldn’t hit it. They just get stuck around the side. I’ve also got a really glass, a really nice glass, supposed to be a coffee grinder. I use it to grind up spices. But I don’t often do wet things in there, so I don’t know how the soaked sesame seeds would do, or even how the sesame seeds would do with oil. I’d have to try that out first.

Andrea:
[10:40] I wonder if you, this, I mean, you just got away from making giant batches of pate, but if you made a kind of a bigger container of the tahini, and then maybe froze it in ice cube trays or something, and then you just pull out one of those when you need it.

Alison:
[11:03] Yeah, I think if we get into the habit. Gable was a bit suspicious of the hummus because I think he’s not used to having hummus, but he did eat some. And, you know, it was great yesterday when we had it the first time. It was great on carrot sticks and bits of apple and pepper, you know. Really, really tasty. Good. So we’ll see.

Andrea:
[11:24] I don’t have anything remotely to compete with. But I had just made whole wheat so I ground whole wheat grains or ground wheat grains I guess and made just my usual sourdough loaf and I was actually making some to send down to a friend so another Alaskan friend I know Leah was just here and another friend was moving from Alaska to the east coast and if you are someone who’s familiar with the united states maps then you know that would take her through here and so they stopped in here actually for breakfast and i made a bunch of loaves of bread and packed a bag of things that went down with her because she was then stopping at another friend’s in California. And that friend actually had a question for you, which I’ll share in just a moment. Yeah. And so anyway, so I had made a bunch of whole wheat bread and… I just had some with butter here because it’s just, I don’t know, hot bread with butter is delicious, which is why I’m excited about this episode. So, yeah, that was my not very good breakfast,

Alison:
[12:50] Was it?

Andrea:
[12:51] Yeah, not very exciting,

Alison:
[12:53] But I’ll have 10 eggs later. Before we dive in to what we’re doing. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, 12 eggs on the side. Before we, I have to say, you were a star with your egg consumption at the UK meetup of Patreons last week. and um i think they gotta be.

Andrea:
[13:09] Famous for something right

Alison:
[13:10] Yeah exactly why not why not for the amount of eggs you consume hey could be worse okay my last name doesn’t.

Andrea:
[13:18] Mean chicken farm

Alison:
[13:19] So i want you because you you are the discord queen discord is our community online with no ads no one pushing anything at you no one curating you so they can sell you this thing you don’t need oh my gosh our online community exactly and there is so much stuff going on there that i that i miss unfortunately a lot of it um could you tell us something about what’s been happening in the discord community recently.

Andrea:
[13:45] Yeah so something that tilsha actually suggested this last year she wanted to do this and um i just never coordinated myself to put it together but said same friend who i sent the loaves of bread to shout out to rachel and who has the question that I have to ask you.

Andrea:
[14:05] She actually made a reading schedule for Nourishing Traditions. So we are going to read through Nourishing Traditions as a group. It’s going to take over a year. The way she divided it up is really smart because, as you know, you and I have both read Nourishing Traditions before. It’s the kind of book you could read multiple times. And… Um, there’s a lot of non, non recipe section in the beginning and at the end, um, it’s all really valuable to read, but there’s no recipes in that portion. So what she did was she divided that section up. So there’s a little bit of that each month, and then you read through a chunk of the recipe section each month. So you get right to the food part without delay but you still get all the you know sally has all that great stuff about equipment and um all of that so anyways so we’re reading through that as a group and we just made like a special uh thread under the books channel and so we can comment as we go i don’t know if you see see the um if you’ve seen the thread or not i

Alison:
[15:20] Have i looked at it very briefly and.

Andrea:
[15:23] Was like already already some stuff is starting to pop up we just i mean we just started this month but so that will be going for quite a while and anybody who wants to could come and jump in you could either just grab the schedule and start at the beginning or go where you know it’s it’s a recipe book it’s not really like you have to read it in um sequence like a like a story so you could jump in wherever we’re at um if you wanted to join so jump on to the um ancestral kitchen podcast.com and where where would they go allison forward

Alison:
[16:00] Slash join ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash join or from the menu that makes a community and that’ll tell you yeah if you want to join us you get access to discord from the very first level that we have so you know depending on your budget and what else you want you can choose where and how you would like to join us yeah.

Andrea:
[16:18] And if you want the um all the extra

Alison:
[16:22] Like the.

Andrea:
[16:23] After show all the downloads and everything all of that goes in a section for the 12 12

Alison:
[16:29] 12 dollar one that’s correct that’s It’s called Companionship. And we are coming, we are slowly coming off Patreon and creating our own platform because of kind of rules that Apple have made with Patreon and payment methods.

Andrea:
[16:45] We’re not the only one. I’ve noticed other podcasts doing that too.

Alison:
[16:49] So, while there’s building us a separate platform, and we will still have Discord, we will still have everything kind of the same. but all of the money that you spend being a member will come directly to supporting the podcast not go into apple’s pocket.

Andrea:
[17:02] Which is nice yeah so depending on when you listen to this um when you go to that link it might show you a link to patreon which if you go there that’s that’s that’s valid that’s where we are and if it doesn’t show that then it means we’ve got our system set up and everybody’s kind of migrated over so either one is fine wherever you’re Wherever we are. So, Alison, tell us what the episode is about.

Alison:
[17:26] So, yeah, finally. This episode is to celebrate the release of a e-book, a free e-book that I’ve created called Baking with Ancient Grains. I’ve realised, you know, I remember about six years ago, I think, maybe saying to Rob, I really like kind of just fermenting grains and doing things with grains. I’d like to kind of become a bit of a, you know, sort of a specialist in that. It was like I could just see myself just going down rabbit holes in every form with fermenting grains. And it seems to kind of materialised over the last five years. So it’s a free book that is over 30 pages long that you can get by going to ancestral kitchen dot com forward slash ancient grains. There’s a sign up in there and then the book will be sent to you automatically. Um andrea you’ve seen the book because you are one of my read-through people helping me make it as wonderful as ever so please tell me what you think about the book.

Andrea:
[18:28] Oh my gosh well i cannot believe that you are uh making this as i could free down this is literally a book it’s you know how usually when you sign up for someone’s email you got like a two-page three-page whatever thing Like, this isn’t that. This is, like, literally a book. Leo was here when I got it, and so she kind of previewed it. And she was like, I have paid so much more for so much less. She’s like, I cannot believe. And I sent Rachel a picture of it, too, and some of the other moms. And they were like, I cannot believe that she’s giving this away for the sign-up. So you really nailed it with this one, Allison. And I’ve been cooking with ancient grains, and I learned so much reading this.

Alison:
[19:11] Thank you.

Andrea:
[19:12] I mean, this is really and I’m really stoked about the episode so we can go into detail on it I have a question for you from Rachel, but after I looked at your show notes, I do not think it’s going to fit in the main episode. So if you’re fine with sticking around, then maybe I’ll ask you after and we can just record an after show.

Alison:
[19:33] Okay, that’s fine. Yeah. If that works.

Andrea:
[19:35] Okay.

Alison:
[19:35] Yeah, cool. Do you want to read the question or do you want to surprise me?

Andrea:
[19:39] No, I want to surprise you. Um, no. So Rachel’s question was, um, how do I know when I should soak or sprout or ferment, or do I do them all or is one better than the other? Um, are the benefits the same? Are they different? And she also wanted to know if she should be, I think if she soaks oats or rice, Should she drain off that water and discard it or cook it in it? So anyways, that was her question. So I know you have thoughts. I kind of want to hear them.

Alison:
[20:16] Yeah, we can stick around afterwards and answer that one for sure.

Andrea:
[20:19] Okay, great. Okay, thanks. All right. Well, then let’s take a quick ad break and then jump right in. All right. Why exactly did you create this awesome guide, Allison?

Alison:
[20:34] Yeah. OK, several reasons, really. I think the first one, just the same as I believe in ancestral foodways, I think that we all should be baking with non-industrial grains. I’ve been baking with them for over a decade. They are so full of flavour, incredibly tasting. They are full of health. And the people who grow them for us often do so in harmony with nature, you know, caring for the soil. They are often harder to grow than modern wheat you know so for instance spout is hard to thresh it’s harder to get the hulls off than standard wheat and so the farmers who do it do it because they care if they were after money then they would just grow the commodity crop wheat because that’s what’s going to bring them the most money and so i feel like it’s a it’s a political act in a way supporting farmers who are doing something differently i created it also because people ask me all the time about ancient grains what are they how are they different when I bake with them how can I use them and of course I’ve got a spelt cookery book which is on our website and I’ve got the in-depth video course on rye but this is a more general thing like an overview for people and you can get it without having to put any financial outlay out so you can just kind of dip your toes into it.

Alison:
[21:56] Um, I also made it because I have just recipes that are great and people can be making them and they’re, some of them are on my website, but they’re kind of hiding, you know, to actually go back through the blog and highlight everything. I’d have a homepage that was, you know, about 18,000 scrolls long. Um, whereas here I can highlight some of those recipes and put them in front of people in a way that’s a bit easier. And so people can easily in that case, choose an alternative to modern wheat in their life. And i think choosing that alternative to modern wheat is very important because there are so many people who struggle to digest modern wheat bread my husband’s an example you know he didn’t eat really hasn’t eaten any modern wheat for almost 20 years now um and you know there is an alternative there are many many alternatives as you will hear in this episode to modern wheat so um another reason why I did it is because I want those people who can’t digest modern wheat to know there is an alternative.

Andrea:
[22:57] Oh, I love it. Okay. Well, let’s just forge ahead then and learn from your knowledge and experience. So why don’t you start, I know this can be a buzzword because I’ve seen it on packages. So therefore I know it’s a buzzword. But can you define what is an ancient grain before we go any further

Alison:
[23:21] Yeah yeah I think that’s important because I think there’s some kind of confusion like there is around every buzzword yes exactly I think the the best phrase that I’ve got to describe it is that it’s an old school grain it’s one that our ancestors have been subsisting on for thousands of years now to explain what an ancient grain is I really have to talk about something called the green revolution the green revolution was a movement that started in the 1940s and it it started as a small scale project that was supposed to help small farmers in mexico with stem rust on their wheat there was a scientist who kind of headed it up called norman borlog and he was absolutely driven like manically so and because of his drive, the program ended up being a program that super intensively selected and crossbred wheat. They solved the stem rest problem, stem rest problem in Mexico. And the yield that this guy, Norman Borlaug, had increased in the wheat was 10 times. So the people in Mexico who were growing their wheat, suddenly for all of this intensive selection and cross-breathing that he did over a period of years, the wheat produced 10 times as much grain. And not only that, but it became able to be grown in any geography.

Alison:
[24:49] So whereas before that, wheats could be grown where they had been grown for thousands of years because they were used to that soil and that climate. But this wheat that he developed, it could be grown in India or, you know, in Canada or in Australia, anywhere.

Alison:
[25:06] But that new wheat needed huge amounts of water and relied on chemical fertilisers.

Alison:
[25:15] After this happened, Borlaug carried on with the project and did further crossing to make the wheat shorter, so that it wouldn’t bow under the weight of all the grain because there’s 10 times as much grain on this wheat and it was five foot tall like wheat used to be. We talked about that on the KTC Private podcast last month. And so all of the stems were just being weighed down with all of the grain. So he had to do more crossbreedings to make the wheat much, much shorter. And that whole process completely transformed the plant. It it was and still is no longer the grain that our ancestors use it is something that’s been taken out of context and messed with on a scale that couldn’t even have been imagined before um there’s no local wheat anymore that works best in our soils or in our geography, and that whole program then due to kind of politics and what was happening in the world just changed everything. It was taken to India and applied to what was thought to be a looming population crisis there. And it created much more food. But in India, it put small farmers out of business because they couldn’t buy the fertilizers that they needed to grow this new wheat. And it forced them into the cities to live in sums in India. It ruined the soils there. It altered the natural water table of the Indian fields. And it made that harvest dependent on chemical output.

Alison:
[26:43] But the governments there supported it because they saw the dollars in it, what they were doing. You know, they were making money. And it is really interesting. If you look at India now, India is now a net exporter of food, a lot of that wheat. And yet it still has swathes of people starving. So it didn’t solve India’s problem. So that was Green Revolution.

Andrea:
[27:08] So it didn’t turn into, you know, now we can grow enough grain for everybody. It’s cheaper. It just came into, well, everybody’s still starving, but look how much money we can make. That’s crazy.

Alison:
[27:18] Wow. Absolutely. And, you know, I’ve heard people say that, you know, poverty in the world is not, that there’s not enough food. It’s that the government’s mismanaging the food, you know, because they want to make money out of it. And, you know, you can see the example of it there of what happened in India in the 50s and the 60s.

Alison:
[27:37] So, an ancient grain, on the other hand, is one that hasn’t been messed with like that. The three that really were worked on were wheat, which was the first, and then the same methods were applied to corn and then to rice. Really? Yeah, so exactly the same things were done to those. Because those two are the other kind of staple grains, aren’t they? You know, maize and rice. And the examples of wheat, corn and rice on our supermarket shelves are this grain that has been developed for yield to use with pesticides and fertilisers that are controlled by giant corporations and use fossil fuels. Of course.

Alison:
[28:20] And with ancient grains what’s wonderful is that we we can turn away from all of that and go to other grains grains that haven’t been hybridized grains that our ancestors used and thrived on and i feel like we’ve talked about this in a recent podcast i can’t remember which one um that i said that evidence had been found on a mortar and pestle kind of grinding stone in italy that our ancestors were eating grains 32 000 years ago but i know thanks to um lots of podcast listeners email me thanks to michael who does amazing research and emails me that there are there is evidence of way before 32 000 years ago of in quotes paleo people eating grains so this is just something we’ve.

Andrea:
[29:09] Done as kind of like as far as we can find people it’s not like Like, oh, 5,000 years ago, humans started eating grains.

Alison:
[29:18] No, way before that, long before.

Andrea:
[29:21] I think Sally Fallon talked about that in the… What’s that book? Traditional Diets or something?

Alison:
[29:28] Ah, okay. I haven’t read that one.

Andrea:
[29:30] Yeah, she talked about aboriginal people in Australia who were, I don’t know if they’re nomadic necessarily, but they moved around a lot. But they were kind of harvesting grains as they went. And then the group that came in behind them would plant. and you know so it’s kind of this circular situation happening yeah

Alison:
[29:58] That makes sense so you know our ancestors have been using these grains for hundreds of tens of thousands of years maybe even hundreds of thousands of years um and then we just came along in the last kind of you know sneeze of time and changed them and now we’re eating all of these changed things that were made for money and for yield not for the things that our ancestors knew were the right things.

Andrea:
[30:23] To develop so let me let me get clear we just clarify so when we look at something like a tomato or something you know vegetable we grow in our garden i know that a lot of selecting and stuff has happened and and you know like a blueberry plant never would have had so many blueberries on it yeah

Alison:
[30:46] But you can.

Andrea:
[30:46] Stand in one place and pick more so when you say emmer or spelt when you’re talking about those old corns with grains on it is it the same as those is it like like i know there’s also wild grass grasses like way back in the beginning and Is this basically, the emmer is the version that people were eating, you know, in, I don’t know, Babylon or whatever?

Alison:
[31:19] Yeah, depending on where they were. And also remember that farmers throughout history have always selected by hand over generations, according to what worked best in their own soil and with their own climate. So this is where heritage grains come in which i i know that you have asked me before what you know what’s the difference between i do not know what that is exactly it’s.

Andrea:
[31:48] Not a buzzword yet you have to tell

Alison:
[31:50] Me it’ll get there um so a heritage grain is one that our ancestors used and for example a heritage wheat grain would be one that they did probably select slowly by looking at their harvest and picking the bigger grains you know the ones that were successful then the next year they planted those not the ones that died you know the ones that looked a bit manky.

Alison:
[32:19] And slowly wheat grains developed that had better characteristics for geographies or for climates And those are called heritage grains. Now, we can get that for rice. There’s a book called Rice’s Life that I read recently, which literally just looks at all of the old rice varieties. So that’s pre-Green Revolution, before rice was taken and done to just be about yield. There are all these old heritage grains that people still have the seeds for. That may have been hand-selected by generations in China or in wherever they grew the rice. The same for corn. So, for instance, I remember in Italy using a variety of corn that was blue. Now, obviously, that’s not an industrial corn, but it was selected for certain things. It’s a heritage grain. So when you hear something like, I think in the States, you have red fife wheat. That is a heritage grain wheat. So it’s still a wheat, but it’s not a wheat that you would buy that someone would sell as a commodity. It’s not a wheat that you would buy in a supermarket. It’s going to cost you more because it’s from an old seed. It’s not been kind of messed with. So wheat isn’t necessarily, you know, all from the green, after the green revolution, all been bred for yield. There are these old seeds that are around, and those are called heritage grains. Does that make sense?

Andrea:
[33:43] No, that makes sense. I can think about it like the animals too. You know, there’s, ah, yeah, of course. older wild versions of chickens that nobody would take the time for, but people kept some and bred them and selected them, and they still have all those characteristics of the old bird, but they maybe are bigger or lay more eggs or whatever.

Alison:
[34:08] Absolutely. So when we were in Italy, we often used to buy chickens that were old chickens, so the breasts were tiny. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And there was bone, lots of bones to make bone broth with. But they didn’t look anything like a chicken, you know, on the main shelf or that, you know, you saw in the supermarket.

Andrea:
[34:28] You made me think of that when you described 10X yield and the shorter stocks. And I was thinking how some of these modern chickens, you know, they’re shorter because they literally cannot stand up. And then I look at my heritage birds and they’re really tall, you know. So, yeah, interesting.

Alison:
[34:49] Exactly. That’s it. Okay. All right. Okay. If that’s clear, what we’ll do now is then we’ll go on to talk about some kind of details and specific on ancient grains. Is that good? Yeah?

Andrea:
[34:59] Sounds good.

Alison:
[35:01] Okay. Okay, so let’s get into the specifics of ancient grains. Andrea, where do you want me to start?

Andrea:
[35:10] Oh my goodness, where to begin? Well, I guess this would be a good question. So you described that it produces 10 times more when they have this modern grain. Am I to infer that that isn’t good for us somehow? Why do we want these why would we choose these you said they’re harder to grow they’re lower yield they’re harder to thrash

Alison:
[35:38] The more etc yeah.

Andrea:
[35:40] They’re more therefore they’re more expensive so explain why

Alison:
[35:43] Okay so the first thing is yeah we just have to look around ourselves we can’t eat modern bread look at the amount of people that can’t eat bread oh i can’t eat bread doesn’t agree with me i can’t eat wheat i can’t yeah you know is modern bread even bread that’s the question i have if you go into a supermarket and just forget about the fact that it’s a modern wheat, variety that’s been bred for yield in somewhere you know 70 years ago and just look at the ingredients on the packet is that bread i don’t.

Andrea:
[36:17] Want to really

Alison:
[36:18] And that’s before you even say well the the first ingredient is wheat well that’s before you even look at what that wheat is modern bread isn’t bread it just isn’t it’s not the bread that our ancestors ate and because of that and because of the state the world is in with its problems with eating bread i just don’t consider it bread at all so do you.

Andrea:
[36:38] Think people look at how difficult it is for us to eat these modern grains and how i mean everybody and their brother has seven kinds of gluten sensitivities You and I and Rob, we’ve all gone through this. And do you think they look around and they say… Well, there’s just no way people have been doing this for that long. I think we shouldn’t be eating grains, but that’s not a historical perspective.

Alison:
[37:10] I think that’s based on the industrial system and the food world that we live in. I think that that’s a kind of an automatic step that someone might take, you know.

Andrea:
[37:19] It’s kind of like the leap to veganism because of the horrific way that animals are treated.

Alison:
[37:25] Animals are treated. And I say, well.

Andrea:
[37:26] Then I won’t eat any animals. And I totally respect that.

Alison:
[37:29] Like that it’s easier to think all or nothing like that isn’t it you know what yeah i just stay away from animals because of look at the look at the cafes you know look at the way that animals are treated or when i can’t eat wheat so i’ll just stay away from wheat and right there’s not there’s more education needed on ancient grains and ways of processing which is part of why i’m here but you can understand why people do that um but it it is not absolutely necessarily thoroughly needed you know there might be a case that you do have to stay away from all grains for a certain period of time to allow your system to heal but i think that it’s easy for the paleo community or the keto community or the community that is also anti-grains or the vegan community or whatever yeah to just go oh just your grains are bad grains bad but um it’s potentially modern wheat that’s bad not grains for a lot of people um so we need them for that because we need proper bread back and we need them because we need to move away from what we’re doing to the land we are covering our land in chemicals we are depleting our topsoil we’re not going to have any topsoil left we are we are literally raping our land and we need to move away from that and buying ancient grains rather than supporting modern wheat can do that.

Alison:
[38:47] I think we need to support diversity and we need to support the farmers that promote it in a good way i also think we need ancient grains because we eat so few things you must have heard i’m sure that all listeners have heard you know all the diets of typical westerners are you know five foods basically and what it’s easy for someone to just eat wheat wheat and wheat um in.

Andrea:
[39:16] Different i did not hear i did not yeah

Alison:
[39:17] I guess there’s people who say well basically the the majority of our diet is like five, six, or eight foods.

Andrea:
[39:25] And that’s probably all commodity crops, huh? Yeah, exactly. Commodity crops, you mean literally, I mean, anybody who’s around farming knows what you’re talking about, but like food that is grown for you know for a specific sale price only it’s not yeah not because it is a nitrogen fixer and your cover cropping or

Alison:
[39:46] No it’s.

Andrea:
[39:48] Beautiful or it’s delicate or anything it’s just money

Alison:
[39:52] There’s um i think i put a stat in the in the book banking with ancient grains um which says something like or maybe i just read it when i was writing the 90 percent of the um grain crops grown are these, modified wheat corn.

Andrea:
[40:08] You did. It’s on page four.

Alison:
[40:10] Okay, thank you. It’s bonkers. And someone can eat breakfast cereal for lunch, a sandwich, a breakfast cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and pasta for dinner. And then you’ve got wheat, wheat, wheat. And it’s all modern.

Andrea:
[40:22] And then they’re like, gosh, my tummy hurts.

Alison:
[40:25] Exactly. And yet the Whole Grains Council tells us that there are 22 grains. You wouldn’t believe that considering most people eat wheat wheat wheat you know on a standard american diet and everyone’s telling us to eat more there’s a big push over here for 30 plants a day obviously grains are plants um all in the media and and there are 22 grains so you can put variety into your diet just by diversifying saying no to modern wheat and saying yes to say five different ancient grains and eat them from monday to friday and then you’ve got diversity you know um with 22 grains you could have a different grain every day of the week for three weeks you know we we need that and we eat so few things so i think that’s another reason why we need ancient grains okay.

Andrea:
[41:18] Okay so i think i’ve got a handle on what the ancient grains are and are not and Okay, you said there’s 22. So what grains, are those all still grown? Are those ones we can still buy? What grains can I use?

Alison:
[41:40] Okay. So, like I said, an ancient grain is a grain that’s not been affected by the Green Revolution. And I think it’s sensible, or considering there are 22 of them, it can get a bit confusing to divide them into three categories. So the first category is similar to wheat grains. And in there I would put spelt, emma and einkorn. Grains that you can handle in a similar way to wheat and taste kind of similar to wheat. Then you’ve got grains that contain gluten, but that are different in working properties to wheat. And I would put rye and barley in that category.

Andrea:
[42:22] Wait, so those have gluten in them?

Alison:
[42:25] Yeah, they have gluten. They have less gluten and different type of gluten to eat. Oh. But they do have gluten in them. So if you’re celiac, you shouldn’t eat them.

Andrea:
[42:36] Okay.

Alison:
[42:37] But like Rob, you might have a problem with wheat and yet be fine with rye, even though rye has gluten in it, which is interesting. Then the third category is gluten-free grains. Gluten-free ancient grains like oats, which we’ve got episodes on. Millet, which we’ve got an episode on. And buckwheat. So those three, there’s wheat, similar grains. Yeah, we’re next.

Alison:
[43:04] There’s gluten-containing grains that are different to wheat. And there’s gluten-free grains. Each of those three types needs to be handled differently when you’re baking with them. So obviously this e-book that you can download is about baking. And there are recipes in there for each of the three different types that I’ve just described. So wheat grains can be made into breads in a similar way to wheat. And my spelt cookbook that you can find on the podcast website under books, I think. I’ll put it in the show notes. Thank you. That talks about the nuances of working with spelt to make a grain. Most of my recipes in there are 100% whole grain, and those will make breads that don’t look like fluffy Instagram, you know, puffy loaves. But any ancient whole grain recipe will be different and will be tastier and will be more nutritious.

Andrea:
[44:08] You don’t have to go past the… You know, the Italian Renaissance paintings and things to see that bread looks different. Not actually vastly different, or maybe I’m just accustomed to this, but it doesn’t look like those puffy, squishy, wonder bread type things in the old pictures. So that’s not what we’re, we’re not going for, we’re not replicating that, not even trying.

Alison:
[44:37] So those um wheat like ancient grains there is no recipe no wheat recipe that i wouldn’t make with those so any recipe that i’ve found so you mean if i if i.

Andrea:
[44:53] Just have a yeah okay i guess sorry

Alison:
[44:56] I was just gonna say any i mean literally if i see a wheat recipe on online i just like all right okay i’m gonna make it with spelt i’m gonna make it with emma make it with icon there There is no recipe that you cannot convert.

Andrea:
[45:06] So choosing one from that. I mean, that makes sense because I’ve been doing that with einkorn. I just throw einkorn and whatever, and it needs to be a little more wet or a little less wet. Yeah. It kind of changes a little bit with the different grains, but the more you use it, you get used to that. So this whole grain, as an example, you have this whole grain sourdough spelt bread recipe in this book.

Alison:
[45:33] That’s right.

Andrea:
[45:35] Could I essentially look at that and say, well, I don’t have spelt, but I do have emmer. Yes. Like, could I kind of switch between the ones in that category?

Alison:
[45:45] I mean, I’d have to toy with it a bit. And you could do that with any kind of spelt recipe. So any of the recipes in my spelt book, the pastry, pasta, you know, it’s not pasta, actually, The breads, the pizza, the cakes, any of them, you could use Emma or Einkorn instead of spelling if you wanted to. Okay.

Andrea:
[46:11] All right. Okay, I think the answer is my question. Because I’m looking through and I’m like, okay, if you’ve got each of these categories… You could just kind of switch around. Yeah. Okay.

Alison:
[46:26] Between the three. Yeah.

Andrea:
[46:29] Do you want me to read Brittany, who is a friend of mine in the, I know her through the literary life. She actually got your spelt book. Can I read what she said?

Alison:
[46:45] Yeah, do. Okay. Please.

Andrea:
[46:46] Okay. So she she got your spelt book and she got the mill, the grain mill. So she said, I just started using my mill. I’ve made approximately four loaves of it and they’ve all been super yummy. I found Allison’s cookbook about spelt to be hugely helpful, especially if you are using an ancient grain. Her book is about spelt, but I tried the same technique with freshly milled einkorn and had good results. I have not tried a bowl yet So these are sandwich loaves It’s a good way to start Getting used to it I’ve also been using only Emmer, einkorn, and spelt for a few years So I know I’m not going to get A huge open crumb With these So that spelt book she’s referring to Is the one you actually sell But anybody who’s just downloading this one For free Sounds like they can just swap it out Okay.

Alison:
[47:47] So yeah, they could start with, there’s one spelt recipe in the free baking with ancient grains. Once you’ve downloaded that, you have that recipe and you can start there and you don’t necessarily have to make that with spelt. You could make it with Emma or Einkorn. I love it. The other thing I wanted to say about those grains is if you are still using some wheat in your kitchen to make bread and you want to just start slowly with these wheat-like ancient grains, you can just put a bit of spelt or a bit of emmer into one of your grains into one of your breads so just maybe put 15 of that in instead of you know instead of 100 wheat make it 85 wheat 15 emmer or 15 spelt and notice what happens notice what happens to the fermenting time notice what happens to the bread as it rises notice what happens to the crumb and try again and then slowly slowly you can add more if you’ve got family who are kind of used to the flavor of wheat, then you can sort of slowly introduce them to the ancient grains that way that’s another easier way to do it if you want to.

Alison:
[48:50] OK, so moving on to gluten-containing but non-wheat-like grains, which have to be worked differently. You can’t knead them. You can’t expect to have them elastic like you would a wheat-like ancient grain. So, for example, a rye, a bread made with rye, will not rise through that gluten mesh network where gluten strands create a mesh which traps the fermenting gases. And, you know, if you stretch that loaf, that’s the gluten mesh network. Rye instead, when it’s mixed with water, creates a gel. And it’s that gel that sort of traps the bubbles in. But you can’t you know if you if you’ve got a fermenting rye loaf you can’t stretch it you just if you could it in your hands it would just come apart in two different bits you don’t need rye but when you when you’re baking with rye you have to watch for other things um so for example rye fermentation produces things called pentasans which can break down that gel like structure in your rye bread rye is a whole nother world when you’re baking and one that is so delicious and so amazing and that I’m, you know, I have and continue to, thanks to Rob, starting me off to deep diving into. And that’s why I have the Rye course. So if you want to be getting to Rye, get into that.

Andrea:
[50:19] Yeah. If you want to get into Rye for sure, I would say, um, I think it’s episode 41, which I can link in the show notes. Um, but you talked about Rye specifically on there, which was such an education for me and you have a 10% off link for your right course as well. But what I think is interesting about your right and actually your spelled book too, um, is, is that it is actually pretty difficult to find recipes online that are 100% ancient grain because of the fact that everybody’s so accustomed to working with wheat that they’re trying to sort of bring in that element of wheat and mimic it a little bit. Yeah. But what’s unique about you is you have literally never cooked with wheat. So, yeah, you’re not trying to copy it at all. You’re just going for perfection with rye.

Alison:
[51:19] Yeah. And because it just seems like an obvious choice to me.

Andrea:
[51:24] Yeah.

Alison:
[51:25] Yeah. So, yeah. You mentioned the 10% discount. There’s a link, which is ancestralkitchen.com forward slash rye. And the discount’s already applied when you use that link. So if you’re interested in purchasing the rye course, then we’ll put that in the show notes as well. There’s going to be a long show notes. Yes. You can just enter that in.

Alison:
[51:46] We love long show notes. Barley is kind of similar to rye. I gave the example of rye. Barley is similar. The third kind of block of gluten-free ancient grains. Again, they have to be handled differently to wheat when baking. So this is buckwheat, teff, amaranth, oats. They don’t have a structure to help rise a loaf of bread. So they are great to use as companions to other wheat style grains so for example there’s a recipe in the spelt book which has got a scald made of sorghum so sorghum flour is cooked up in a porridge style and then put in the spelt bread so that’s what I mean as a companion or you can use them on their own to make alternative breads and I use the word alternative because of the environment that we’re in now where everyone thinks that breads have to look a certain way but these breads weren’t alternative for the populations that lived on them generation after generation because those were the grains that grew around them and therefore that’s the bread that they make um so for example teff pancakes which we’ve talked about quite a lot on the podcast and we have a video going back of um chef aaron goldstein making teff pancakes, They were made in Africa called injera.

Alison:
[53:09] Oat cakes also were made in Great Britain. They are an example of an alternative bread with a gluten-free ancient grain. Um, and buckwheat is another example. So in Northern France, there’s a very strong tradition of crepes made. So crepes are very, very thin pancakes made with buckwheat. I think the Russian ones too. Yeah. Are very traditional. Well, blini.

Andrea:
[53:32] Blini.

Alison:
[53:33] Exactly. So those are, um, all breads that were breads, you know, just because they don’t look like our bread, we call them alternative breads, but they’re not really alternative breads because they’re breads.

Andrea:
[53:44] Our bread is actually the alternative bread because when you want to look at populations that have been eating these ancient breads and flatbreads and pan breads and, you know, polenta type things, it goes back a lot farther and it’s a lot more widespread.

Alison:
[54:05] Yeah, absolutely. so um there is a recipe for oat cakes one of those alternative breads in the free ebook so once you’ve downloaded you can start making those and before yeah we do talk about the recipes which i want to talk about andrea i want to talk about milling your own flour just briefly after years of buying my own flour you know um i’ve been doing that since we you know up until like a year ago since we met um now all the time i mill my own flour and i would never go back now to shop bought flour the the flavor the nutrition difference that you can hear about if you go back and listen to our milling episode um the economy of buying the grains in bulk the convenience of just oh fresh grains look two minutes and it’s done and the connection i feel between my bread on my plate, you know, on my family’s plates, and the grain is immense. All of those are immense to me.

Andrea:
[55:08] I don’t think anybody who’s gone to milling flour can go back. It’s really… Once you’re in, you’re in.

Alison:
[55:16] You’re in. Exactly.

Andrea:
[55:18] You can’t go back from that. And I was thinking earlier, Allison, when you were talking about the cost, that honestly, if you were buying the whole grains in bulk the way you are and the way I am, and then milling them yourself, I actually think it’s cheaper than if you’re buying flour at the grocery store. Yeah. I’m going to have to run numbers on that because, you know, I love doing that. But I’m just in my head, I’m mapping it out and I’m pretty sure that it’s cheaper. So you can get your organic ancient grains and make your bread cheaper than buying white flour at the grocery store, which is just wild.

Alison:
[55:52] I think you’re right because I was working earlier this year on a guide for the podcast website. And whilst doing that, I was researching on Azure, actually, how much you pay for ground flour and how much you pay for bulk purchasing grains. And I can’t remember if I put the actual specifics of how many cents and dollars it was in the guide or whether I just put that in my notes before I wrote the guide. But it was substantial, the difference. So you’re right.

Andrea:
[56:24] Well, and the Azure price for flour is way cheaper than the grocery store.

Alison:
[56:29] Oh, gosh. Okay.

Andrea:
[56:30] So come to that. So you’re looking at the bulk prices there. But if somebody is just going to the supermarket and buying like a bag of flour versus, you know, going to a mill near you or Azure or somewhere and saying, get out 25 pounds or.

Alison:
[56:50] Well it’s hard to do that anyway especially with whole grain flour because it’s going to have those fats in it and unless you can oh yeah let’s get it in the freezer those fats are going to degrade before you’ve had a chance to finish that flour.

Andrea:
[57:00] So yeah 100 another reason and and if been people always say you know how long does honey last how long do grains last and i tell them the things that we find in egyptian tombs are grains honey and essential oils so if you need to stock up on one of those things. You’re fine. You’re fine.

Alison:
[57:22] That sounds like quite a nice life, actually. A lot of us all.

Andrea:
[57:26] Yeah, the riches of Egypt. Yeah.

Alison:
[57:30] Okay. So that guide to milling is up on our website. So if you go to ancestralkitchenpodcast.com forward slash milling, m-i-l-l-i-n-g you can view that on your browser and.

Andrea:
[57:49] Put it in the notes

Alison:
[57:50] Thank you another one okay so let’s um move on and talk about some specific recipes okay, Okay, so now let’s talk about baking specific recipes with these grains, which you will find five recipes in my book.

Andrea:
[58:11] Yes, this is the part that we’re all here for. Exactly.

Alison:
[58:15] So the first recipe is for Scottish oat cakes. Now, when I say the word oat cake, sometimes people get confused because it’s got the word cake in it. You think, well, it’s not a cake really.

Andrea:
[58:29] By people, you mean Americans?

Alison:
[58:31] See, I, yeah, I do. I was being polite.

Andrea:
[58:35] I know what you’re calling us out.

Alison:
[58:38] Oat cakes, I would say they’re more like biscuits and cakes, but I think that might still confuse you.

Andrea:
[58:43] And then you really lost us.

Alison:
[58:46] Exactly. So crackers is probably the word that you would understand for what I mean by an oat cake. It’s a flat, thin mass of dough. And there is a recipe in the free baking with ancient grains for Scottish oat cakes. They are made with 100% oats, which are an ancient grain. And they are thin and flat and easy to make and crisp and delicious. So that’s the first recipe. That recipe is on my blog too. And it’s one of my most popular hits.

Andrea:
[59:23] Yeah, I was actually looking at it yesterday. Because you have two oat cake recipes on your website. But this one, I like that you’ve got the… Can I just read, Alice, in your description? Of course you can. Because it is poetry. You said… Biting into a freshly made golden oat cake is a complete joy. First, there’s the satisfying snap as it breaks. Then the crumbly, crunchy oats impart their toasty flavor. And as you chew, you understand why oats are called the golden cereal.

Alison:
[1:00:04] That can be hard.

Andrea:
[1:00:06] He used all these, uh, what is the word? The onomatopoetic, whatever. whatever words like

Alison:
[1:00:13] Sounds nice when you read it just makes me.

Andrea:
[1:00:20] Want to eat them so good

Alison:
[1:00:22] They are good and there is a recipe right there for you to make them and everyone else okay podcast exactly they’ll um they’ll go really quickly maybe double it.

Andrea:
[1:00:32] To 16 look at that huh yeah for my family definitely

Alison:
[1:00:35] Yeah exactly um then the next recipe is as you’ve mentioned a bit earlier a spelt sourdough that’s a really simple recipe so you know if you’ve never used an ancient grain before if you’ve baked or if you haven’t baked the instructions in there will guide you through how to make that all you need is a sourdough starter and some spelt doesn’t have to be a spelt sourdough starter. If you’ve got a wheat sourdough starter or a rye sourdough starter, that’s fine. It will give you a sandwich loaf which you bake in a tin that will knock the socks off the flavour of any wheat loaf that you’ve made.

Andrea:
[1:01:15] Heck yes. Oh, that looks so good. And you’ve got all these links, too, in the book, I want to say. I was really impressed with all the resources, everything up to episodes we’ve done on specific topics to links to the pan you use, videos of you making the aluminum foil. Like, really, the only thing you didn’t do was fly across and hold my hand. It’s all in there.

Alison:
[1:01:44] I tried to give as much. And there’s color photos at the end.

Andrea:
[1:01:47] Like our cookbooks that we sell,

Alison:
[1:01:49] All the colour photos are at the end. And so if you want to print this book, which both Andrea and I have, then if you don’t want to print the colour photos, I think on the first page of the introduction, I tell you, just print from page 1 to page 20, whatever it is. And you can print that in black and white without using up your colour ink. Or if you want to print the beautiful photos, you can print those as well. But you can do it either way. So there’s photos there as well.

Andrea:
[1:02:14] Because they are delicious but i did here they are

Alison:
[1:02:19] Okay the third recipe is a millet polenta bread and this you know millet as we talked about in our episode on millet is often just um sidelined as a bird feed but millet was routinely used for polenta in italy before corn came from the new world so you can make easily uh polenta which then is put into a loaf tin and left to cool and then you can slice it and of course this one’s gluten-free yeah oh.

Andrea:
[1:02:54] Yes go on so you you are the place that i found out that polenta wasn’t just corn i mean i had no idea before you you had told me before i saw this but i didn’t know and what does polenta mean do you know

Alison:
[1:03:11] That’s a good question i don’t know no i wonder if it’s just like it means dough i mean literally pasta means dough um i don’t know what polenta means we need to do some etymology research on that because that’s really quite interesting but.

Andrea:
[1:03:24] It is interesting to me because of, I know in that What I Eat book, it comes up a lot. And then Beatrice made some in a video. She made Ugali, which is like a, basically it’s kind of like polenta. It’s like a cornmeal cake. So in the description, it sounds similar.

Alison:
[1:03:50] You know, polenta is interesting because you can eat it kind of as a, not liquid, but as a paste. Yeah. Just like you would eat a porridge or a pottage kind of idea. But then you can make it set and eat it. And Italians have got used to having it, you know, set. And then they would have it on the side as a carb with something. Now, people used to do that with oats. They used to cook up porridge and then pour it into a drawer and leave it and it sets. And then they used to cut off bits of it during the week. Kind of a similar idea to Bolenta, but we’ve completely lost that with oats. No one pours porridge into their drawer anymore in Scotland, I don’t think.

Andrea:
[1:04:36] I mean, you don’t,

Alison:
[1:04:38] But I’d love to go there and see them doing it. Whereas Italians do still keep their extra polenta And use it the next day And that’s what, you know That is such a useful thing to put into a All you need is a bread tin And you put it in there And you’ve got a beautiful kind of bread Yeah.

Andrea:
[1:05:00] And that’s exactly how my friend Beryl made it And she’s from Kenya, from the Luya tribe And she would make, like with white cormonel It’s just like it has to be white. And she’d make it in a pan and dump it out, just like you said. And then we would just kind of cut a piece to have with her chicken or whatever. But I think it was you that told me about taking a slice the next day and frying it. I was like, what? So good.

Alison:
[1:05:31] It’s so good.

Andrea:
[1:05:32] And the internet is useless, in case anyone’s wondering. Because there’s a thousand posts here saying, oh, polenta means cornmeal. Well, polenta is an Italian dish made of corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn. They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Alison:
[1:05:48] It is, but it wasn’t. You know, chestnut flour is used in polenta a lot as well.

Andrea:
[1:05:52] What?

Alison:
[1:05:53] Okay. Yeah, it’s really nice, really sweet and lovely. Anyway. Okay, so next recipe. Focus. The next recipe in the book is rye whole grain sourdough. So this is one of the grains that is not wheat like behaves differently as i was explaining with rye but still has gluten in it and this probably is the most complicated recipe in the book but even if you’ve never worked with rye before um the recipe and the instructions will will talk you through how to make it it’s so delicious and it’s it’s whole grain so it’s got that deep flavor but it’s also sliceable. So literally you can make sandwiches with it as well.

Andrea:
[1:06:37] Could you make this with barley then?

Alison:
[1:06:41] You could, but I probably wouldn’t use the same process because the process of the, it’s got a very large kind of pre-ferment in it. So you make a pre-ferment, which is like a huge starter basically. And the reason you do that is to keep the acidity level of the main dough at the right place. So those pentesans I was talking about earlier on don’t attack your bread. That is not necessary with barley. Barley doesn’t have that same problem. So I probably would not use the same process for barley.

Andrea:
[1:07:12] Okay, that’s why we pay you for the course because I don’t know what anything you just said means. All right.

Alison:
[1:07:20] Okay, last recipe in the e-book is buckwheat pancakes. I make these lots of different ways. The one that’s in the e-book is made from a whole buckwheat grain that is soaked to make it soft and then blended up with any live culture and fermented naturally and then fried in my cast iron pan. Oh, yeah, you’ve got.

Andrea:
[1:07:47] Because you’ve got, you said kefir yogurt. apple cider vinegar, sourdough, discurps, anything that has live probiotics in it. Well, that’s handy.

Alison:
[1:07:54] That recipe is simple because it’s mostly just soaking. You soak the whole grains. And then when they’re soft, you blend them up and leave them with the kefir. You just leave it. And as long as you, you know, if you kind of want it on a Sunday, you have to start it on a Thursday. But there’s nothing to do, really. And then buckwheat is so tasty. It really is. And so it’s got such a distinctive smell when it’s cooking and the pancakes stick together really well because often with gluten free grains, when you’re making breads or pancakes, it’s hard to get them to stick together because they don’t like you make a millet pancake, it will just fall apart. Buckwheat has this kind of elasticity to it that means you can just do 100% buckwheat and the pancakes are wonderful. They don’t fall apart.

Andrea:
[1:08:40] No wonder it’s so popular for pancakes. Geez.

Alison:
[1:08:44] Exactly.

Andrea:
[1:08:45] Or crepes or whatever.

Alison:
[1:08:46] So all of those five recipes are part of the 30 pages of the book. The rest of it is kind of an education in ancient grains, what they are, the different grains you can use, baking tips for baking with them. And there’s so many resources. I couldn’t believe it.

Andrea:
[1:09:02] Yeah, I’m looking at it now. You’ve got three pages of resources.

Alison:
[1:09:05] How many?

Andrea:
[1:09:06] You’ve got YouTube videos, podcast episodes.

Alison:
[1:09:10] Yeah.

Andrea:
[1:09:12] Courses that are relevant.

Alison:
[1:09:14] Loads of blog posts.

Andrea:
[1:09:16] Just tons

Alison:
[1:09:17] Of information That you know Whatever.

Andrea:
[1:09:20] You Wherever you

Alison:
[1:09:22] Want to go with your ancient grain baking Journey.

Andrea:
[1:09:24] There’s something in here Your stacked Scottish oat cakes Yeah First of all I love how you’re such a stickler for detail Because That’s how I do it too When I’m cooking Leah and I were laughing because I was like wow I realized I’m way more meticulous I thought I was a sloppy cooker, but then she was standing there watching me dice potatoes, and I was like, they have to be exactly the same size. She’s like, chowder. Oh, man. But I love how perfect your oat cakes look.

Alison:
[1:09:58] Thank you. I’m looking at the pictures in the back now, trying to not…

Andrea:
[1:10:01] I mean, if somebody’s coming onto this and has no idea how much research Allison has done into oat cakes… Just no, she’s at like Silmarillion level here on the oat cakes.

Alison:
[1:10:16] You know, to try and record this podcast today, I worked on the oat book a bit this morning for like two hours I had.

Andrea:
[1:10:22] Ah, good.

Alison:
[1:10:22] And I’m writing, I’m trying to write a section on two breads called Have a Cake and Clap Cake. And I had like notes everywhere all over the bed and then books and just the computer was on the stand. And of course, I don’t use a keyboard really, so I had the microphone and it was only a big pile. And then I tried to make some space to record the podcast. And I said, it’s just books everywhere. I need more space. I’m writing a book. I need more space.

Andrea:
[1:10:47] You’re like the mad scientist, like red strings. Okay, so the hammer cake. Oh, I’m not struggling. I’m not the problem over here. But it’s so beautiful. So you can see

Alison:
[1:10:57] The buckwheat pancakes as well in there on page 29. Oh.

Andrea:
[1:11:01] Oh, yes.

Alison:
[1:11:02] That picture. I fried those ones in butter there.

Andrea:
[1:11:06] Why do my buckwheat pancakes, my buckwheat pancakes are like black? Is that because I’m using?

Alison:
[1:11:10] That’s because you’re using buckwheat that still has its hulls on. So the inside of the buckwheat is white. The outside is black. And the black has a really intense, much stronger flavor. Most of the histamine is in the black bit, if a buckwheat grain. So you can buy whole buckwheat grains. My recipe is for white buckwheat grains. So they’ve already had their hulls.

Andrea:
[1:11:31] Oh, I see. You said hulled. I thought you were saying whole buckwheat grains. Oh, no.

Alison:
[1:11:36] Hold hold i.

Andrea:
[1:11:37] Get it now

Alison:
[1:11:38] I should say hold um so you can buy for example in england you can buy white buckwheat flour from hobadod’s the wonderful um grain supplier and they have light buckwheat flour which has got little bits of the black in it but not much so you get a bit of the black flavor but it isn’t overpowering black black buckwheat is quite strong but very nice oh.

Andrea:
[1:12:01] I I mean, we like it. So I guess whenever we try to hold one, it’ll seem mild.

Alison:
[1:12:08] Yeah. It will do. So that’s why yours is black. Mine are golden. And there’s a picture at the top right of the buckwheat fermenting. And sometimes buckwheat fermenting can go pink on the top. I remember Rebecca Zipp, who I just did the episode last month about gluten-free one. She said to me, oh, my buckwheat kind of went pink on the top and smelled funny. But that’s fine. It doesn’t matter if it goes pink. It doesn’t have to go pink, but it does sometimes. Don’t worry about that. don’t worry if it smells a bit funny because that’s the um probiotics off gassing that’s fine it doesn’t taste like that it tastes absolutely wonderful um so yeah i’m looking at the pictures now i’m thinking oh they look good yeah they do it’s just it’s so wonderful to see all this information together you know because i’ve been kind of slowly working on this in different, squirreling ways not realizing how much information i just had at my fingertips, and to feel like I could put together this kind of beautiful, useful thing, useful and beautiful both at the same time, for people to just download and start.

Andrea:
[1:13:14] I know, just keep going. No, I think this is so exciting.

Alison:
[1:13:18] Thank you.

Andrea:
[1:13:18] All the ladies, I hope they’re listening, they just said, we can’t wait for it to come out. Tell her to hurry up, get it out, get it out. So I’m so happy that they can download this now. And I, the buckwheat and soaking the buckwheat and stuff I see in the recipe makes me want to ask you Rachel’s question. But I also see the time on this episode. So I know, I know we have to go to the after show for that. But was there anything else you wanted to get on the main feed before we wrap this up? No. Okay. Got it covered. So go, where, where do I download this, Alison?

Alison:
[1:13:55] You can download this at Ancestral Kitchen, my website, not the podcast website. So ancestralkitchen.com forward slash or one word ancient grains.

Andrea:
[1:14:07] OK, and of course, that’s in the slow note, slow notes. That’s in the show notes. Yeah. All right. OK, well, let’s say farewell to the main feed and jump onto the after show. And I will see you over there.

Alison:
[1:14:24] Great. Thank you.

Andrea:
[1:14:31] If you’d like to support the podcast, you can join as a patron. Choose from various levels starting at $5. You can see what we offer at AncestralKitchenPodcast.com.

Alison:
[1:14:43] While you’re there, check out our favorite books, supplements, and kitchenware, or give a one-time donation.

Andrea:
[1:14:49] Leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.

Alison:
[1:14:53] And if you know someone who would love our show, tell them about us.

Andrea:
[1:14:56] You are helping to bring ancestral food wisdom into modern kitchens changing the world one plate at a time