Food – Page 32 – Into the Woods

Wheat: Proceed with caution

Previously in this blog I’ve expressed the opinion that the prevalence of gluten intolerance is exaggerated. Less than 1 percent of the population has coeliac disease. Still, gluten sensitivity seems to be increasing. Something must be going on. What could that be?

Recently I came across an article about a renegade MIT scientist who has a new theory about this. She thinks that the gluten problem is caused by glyphosate — that is, the herbicide Roundup, which is made by Monsanto and other companies.

I have no way of knowing whether this theory is valid. However, this scientist mentions a fact that is new to me, and it’s shocking. That is that wheat farmers are spraying Roundup on their crops just before harvest, to dry out the wheat and make the harvest process easier for the combine machine.

When I first read this, I was skeptical that farmers would do anything so obviously dangerous. But a little Googling shows that, not only is it true, Monsanto promotes this use of Roundup as a way of boosting combine output by up to 30 percent. How long Roundup persists on plants and soil after it is sprayed is highly variable. Under some conditions, it takes months for it to break down. When Roundup is sprayed on a field to clear weeds before planting, there probably is usually time for the Roundup to mostly break down before the crop reaches our kitchens.

However, if Roundup is sprayed on wheat three or four days before harvest, you can be very sure that it remains in the wheat, and therefore in the flour, until we eat it.

I take two lessons from this.

First is that our industrialized farmers cannot be trusted. If poisoning us yields them higher profits, then they’ll poison us. Unless we’re paying attention, we won’t know what they’re doing.

Second is that, from now on, I will use only organic wheat.

Drug store lunch counter

I thought that all the old-fashioned drug store lunch counters had closed long ago. But I discovered today that there’s one in Walnut Cove at Hick’s Pharmacy. It’s called the Red Rooster. I asked one of the women who works there why there is no sign out front. She said there is — the red rooster logo. I guess all the locals knew that. And now that I know, I guess that makes me a local too. As far as I know, Hick’s Pharmacy is locally owned and not part of a chain. So that’s where I’ll do business hereafter.

Today’s lunch special was pinto beans, slaw, and corn bread for $4.50. I had it with onions.

Winter pestos

I am still grieving for the basil of summer and the amazing pestos it made. Carrying pesto into the winter is greatly to be desired, not least because pesto is the best vehicle I know for delivering intense quantities of medicinal garlic. Kale, and, or, parsley are the usual winter substitutes. I can’t get excited about that, though I need to try it. This pesto is made from sun-dried tomatoes, plus the usual pesto ingredients — walnuts, parmesan, garlic and olive oil.

To be honest, it’s a little cloying. But that may be a good thing, because it reduces the temptation to eat too much.

It occurs to me that a bit of red miso substituted for part of the salt would be a good lick. I’ll try that next time.

Salad of clover sprouts and grated carrot

Sprout season has commenced

Clover sprouts

For a while I had forgotten about sprouts. But I remembered recently while at Whole Foods, puzzling over what sort of winter salad fixin’s were freshest and cheapest. Whole Foods’ salad fixin’s were fresh, but they weren’t cheap. So I ordered fresh sprouting seeds from SproutPeople.org, got out my sprouting jars, and got back into the habit.

If you order from SproutPeople, complain in the comments box at checkout that their shipping prices are too high. They’re trying to get everyone to order more than $60 worth to get free shipping. That’s a lot of seeds to order at once.

Sourdough in winter

During a couple of early cold snaps, I learned that making sourdough bread takes forever in a cold kitchen. Though all the experts seem to like the idea of a long, slow rise, I don’t have forever. The leaven process must complete overnight, and the rest of the job must be done in time to bake by 5 p.m. or so the next day.

The method I’ve hit upon is to let the dough rise in the oven with the oven light on. Then things seem to happen at about the same rate as during the summer. And while I’m at it, I set a jar of clover sprouts in the oven with the dough. All seeds (as far as I know) germinate better when they’re warm.

The standard abbey sourdough loaf is big — about three pounds. It’s half whole wheat. The whole wheat dough rises nicely, but I don’t get much oven spring with half whole wheat. The crumb is far from dense, though, and it’s great hot, cold, or as toast. When there’s company, or for a showy loaf, I use unbleached flour. That makes a much higher loaf with dramatic oven spring.

The thermostat on a typical winter morning

The dough doubles after about four hours in a warm oven

Ready to put the lid on and bake. The parchment is for lifting the dough out of the bowl into the Dutch oven. Lining the dough-rising bowl with parchment, then lifting by the edges of the paper, is the only way I’ve found to transfer the dough to the Dutch oven, which is preheated to 500 degrees. Upending the dough bowl over the Dutch oven deflates the dough.

Another finished loaf of abbey bread

Apple expedition

What an apple should look like

Someday the abbey’s orchard will have a stand of grand old apple trees that will supply a variety of apples from late summer until fall. But unfortunately the abbey’s orchard is only five years old. Though it’s producing apples, the young trees can’t make apples faster than the squirrels can sneak over the fence from the woods and carry them off (along with the figs).

Therefore, whenever we’re out and about, Ken and I are on the lookout for abandoned apple trees. On a recent trip to Asheville, we hit the jackpot. There were two grand apple trees — a green and a red — near a friend’s house, and he had been given picking rights by the owner.

I won’t repeat my rant about the worthlessness of grocery store apples. I’ll just summarize with the fact that, whatever they are, they are not apples. I will make do with commercial apples when I can’t get anything else. But the only real apples come from old, abandoned trees. The age of the tree helps ensure that the apples are of an honest variety meant for eating rather than shipping. And being abandoned ensures that they’ve never been sprayed. A healthy apple tree is remarkably pest free. The ugly skin of the apple is the truest indicator of its quality. An apple with a beautiful skin is hardly ever fit to eat.

These apples were at the perfect time for picking. They were hard and very juicy.

Ken in the apple tree

The red tree wasn’t quite as grand as the green tree

The green apple tree

Ken dines in Dingle (without me)

Photos by Ken Ilgunas

Ken is in Ireland, near the end of a six-week trip to England, France, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Ireland. He’ll be home in a few days.

I insisted that, while he is in Dingle in County Kerry, he have dinner at my favorite place — Benners Hotel. This evening he emailed me photos from Dingle, including a photo of his Sunday night supper. Pricey, wasn’t it, Ken?

I’ve stayed at Benners Hotel in Dingle on both my trips to Ireland. The food is excellent. Dingle is a charming fishing village on the coast of County Kerry. And County Kerry is on the west coast of Ireland. One of the great things about the Kerry coast is that the highest mountain in Ireland is right up against the sea, making for some rugged terrain and wild scenery. Off the coast lie the mysterious skelligs — the spires of rock jutting out of the sea. Some of the skelligs are like small islands. There was a tiny monastery on Skellig Michael during the Middle Ages.

No doubt Ken will have more photos from County Kerry later on.

A photo of the Dingle harbor that I took on my last trip there.

The official abbey bread

Click on photo for larger version

Any proper abbey (or so I have thought for a long time) ought to have its trademark bread. And any abbot worth his salt ought to be able to bake it. Not just any bread will do. There has to be something special about it. So gradually I have been refining the recipe for Acorn Abbey’s signature loaf.

I just used the dreaded word “recipe.” I’ve been making bread for decades, measuring vaguely and just baking out of experience. But with the rustic sourdough loaves, I have been measuring, by weight, using a kitchen scale. This is because I’ve found that to get consistent results, one needs to control the “hydration” of bread — that is, the ratio of flour to water. Abbey bread at present is 85 percent hydration (100 parts flour to 85 parts water, by weight). Though wetter bread would be nicer, it’s much harder to handle. I probably will experiment with trying to increase the hydration a few percent and see how it goes.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the abbey bread is inspired by Michael Pollan’s book Cooked, in which the bread concept is based on the sourdough bread at Tartine bakery in San Francisco. It’s baked in a Dutch oven.

There was one part of Pollan’s method that just did not work for me. He gives the dough its final proofing in a bowl with the loaf face down. He upends the bowl over the Dutch oven and lets it plop. I found that unworkable. What if the dough sticks to the bowl? What if the dough loses its loft from the fall? I’ve settled on a method which is a bit more trouble but which is reliable. I line the proofing bowl with wide strips of parchment paper, then set the loaf right side up on the parchment paper for the final proofing. When it’s ready for the Dutch oven, I lift the loaf by the ends of the parchment paper and set it gently into Dutch oven.

The total amount of time to make decent sourdough bread is not that great. But one must start the night before, and the bread requires regular attention on baking day. The abbey bread is usually done by 5 p.m.

I’ve settled on a kind of Mediterranean schedule of baking every three days. Strangely enough, this has reduced the net amount of bread, and therefore carbs, consumed at the abbey. This is because I’ve stopped making biscuits and rolls, all of which tend to get eaten at one meal. On day 1, the bread is served warm for supper. On days 2 and 3 it comes back as toast or in slices at supper. If there is any left (rare), then the chickens get it.

From the orchard

There were many apple pies this summer, but only one pie from the abbey orchard. Though the five-year-old trees produced a respectable quantity of apples this year, the squirrels got them before we did. At present, the squirrels are stealing the figs.

Grocery store apples, as far as I’m concerned, are useless for pies. I like ugly, old-fashioned apples. Ken noticed an apple tree in someone’s yard about a mile up the road and was bold enough to ask if we could buy some apples. They gave them to us, of course. It was an old tree that had gone feral, and the apples were sublimely ugly. We got four pies out of those very local apples.

Fermented onions

Ken was away for an unexpectedly long time in June to visit his parents and also traveling to do publicity appearances for his book. Consequently the garden got a bit out of hand, and a surplus built up. In particular there was a surplus of onions, and onions, being sacred, are much too good to waste. So what to do?

Ferment them.

Though all my fermenting experience is with sauerkraut, pretty much any kind of vegetable can be fermented if you know the process. The process isn’t complex: Put the vegetables, appropriately sliced or shredded, into a crock and use the right amount of salt or brine.

As with sauerkraut, the prep work is a huge chore. I peeled about 30 pounds of onions and cut them into wedges. I put them in the crock and covered them with brine made from Celtic sea salt (about 3 tablespoons of salt per quart of water). In about three weeks we’ll see how they taste.

These are sweet and mild Georgia-style onions, and they’re organic, like everything grown at the abbey. To my surprise, peeling them and cutting them didn’t even provoke any onion tears.