Food – Page 44 – Into the Woods

Sourdough starter: no harm in trying

I bought the crock at a junk shop in Madison for 99 cents.

I’m sure I would have experimented with sourdough years ago, were it not for the fact that, while I was working, I didn’t have much time for baking. Plus, I lived in San Francisco for 17 years. Baking sourdough bread at home in San Francisco would seem a bit odd, since the city is full of good sourdough bread.

As a nerd, I could never be content to just blindly follow some directions and end up (hopefully) with sourdough bread. I need to understand what’s going on. As usual, Wikipedia supplies the fundamentals. Because I’ve made homemade sauerkraut, all the concepts are familiar to me. Even experienced sourdough makers often seem to think that what makes sourdough is just yeast. But it’s more complicated than that. Wikipedia explains that sourdough is a symbiotic combination of yeast and lactobacillus. Now we’re getting somewhere…

Yeast is a fungus. It eats sugar, and the useful byproducts of this metabolism are carbon dioxide and alcohol. When we bake with yeast, the carbon dioxide bubbles cause the bread to rise, and the alcohol is baked off.

Lactobacillus is an anaerobic bacteria. It eats sugar and produces lactic acid. Lactic acid is a food preservative. It’s what makes sauerkraut.

In sourdough, the lactobacillus feed mostly on the metabolic byproducts of the yeast. The lactic acid produced by the lactobacillus gives sourdough bread its sour taste. It’s the same process that makes sauerkraut sour. The lactic acid has another important effect in the sourdough starter, which can sit at room temperature for weeks without rotting. The lactic acid lowers the pH of the concoction. This acidity prevents unwanted bacteria from growing. This is the same principle that makes vinegar a preservative, and it’s what keeps bad bacteria out of sauerkraut.

And now we can see why most recipes for making your own sourdough starter start with pineapple juice. The acidity of the pineapple juice keeps the bad bacteria from growing until the starter is mature enough to produce enough lactic acid to do the job. Then we can use water.

So where do the yeast and lactobacillus come from to inoculate the starter? They’re all around us, especially on the grains of wheat.

If you’d like to make a sourdough starter, I’d suggest Googling around for recipes. Read several recipes. I’m using this one, more or less.

I’ll post more photos as the process continues. It may take up to two weeks before I’m ready to make sourdough bread.

Not much to see yet

Farm subsidies

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

Did you know that the federal government provides billions of dollars in subsidies to millionaire and industrial growers for producting animal feed? And that fruit and vegetable farmers get only 1 percent of these subsidies? That’s one reason the Big Mac is so cheap — government subsidies pay part of its cost.

Let's hear it for the chickens

March 4: four eggs. There are three nests in the henhouse, but they always share and take turns.

My four chickens have averaged slightly better than three eggs a day all winter, and it was a cold winter. Even though it’s still early March, they’re already starting to return to their four-eggs-a-day standard of productivity. They have only ever broken one egg, and that was when they were young and inexperienced. I myself have accidentally broken three or four.

They are content, yet demanding, always hoping for treats, which they get, every day. Sometimes the best I can do is cut up some raw potatoes or carrots, or maybe apples, or pluck the outer leaves from a head of cabbage. Their favorite treats are kitchen scraps — peelings and leftovers. Pasta drives them wild. They seem to think it’s worms. On cold mornings they relish a warm breakfast — cracked grains mixed with leftover gravy or soup. During the summer, finding treats for them is easy because the kitchen always has lots of summer produce. During the winter, treats are more of a challenge. They always have laying mash in their feeder. But it’s treats that keep things interesting.

Newspapers and magazines are full of stories about backyard chickens these days, but here’s one of the best pieces I’ve come across. Peter Lennox, an academic, waxes philosophical on the keeping of chickens:

Watching chickens is a very old human pastime, and the forerunner of psychology, sociology and management theory. Sometimes understanding yourself can be made easier by projection on to others. Watching chickens helps us understand human motivations and interactions, which is doubtless why so many words and phrases in common parlance are redolent of the hen yard: “pecking order”, “cockiness”, “ruffling somebody’s feathers”, “taking somebody under your wing”, “fussing like a mother hen”, “strutting”, a “bantamweight fighter”, “clipping someone’s wings”, “beady eyes”, “chicks”, “to crow”, “to flock”, “get in a flap”, “coming home to roost”, “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched”, “nest eggs” and “preening”.

On bread and bakeware

I bought an iron skillet only three weeks ago, but it has already become my favorite pan for baking. Whether it’s biscuits, cornbread, or rolls, the iron pan produces the most even baking and the best crusts, both top and bottom.

Today’s rolls contained both cashews and soy flour. I continue with my experiments to try to produce a truly good bread with the lowest glycemic index possible. Just using whole wheat flour, of course, is better than white flour. But I don’t regard whole wheat alone as a true glycemic-friendly food.

Some of my experiments have involved brans, both wheat bran and oat bran. Bran, though, makes a coarse, not very tasty bread. I’ve also tried flax seed meal. But there’s something about the consistency of the flax seed that detracts from a really satisfying bread-eating experience.

One way to lower the glycemic index of bread is to add protein. For today’s bread, I whizzed in a blender half a cup of cashews in a cup and a quarter of water. I added a little more than a quarter of a cup of soy flour, then enough whole wheat flour to make the dough. It was pretty darn good bread.

There are some low-cost iron skillets from China on the market, but I’m sure you’d be much happier with an American-made skillet from Lodge.

The rolls always fall out of the iron skillet clean as a whistle.

Rehabilitating potatoes

I’ve written previously about how sweet potatoes have a lower glycemic index than white potatoes and are all around healthier than white potatoes. But lately I’ve become aware that there are things we can do to lower the glycemic insult of white potatoes.

If you Google around, you’ll find a number of sources that say that red potatoes are slightly less of a glycemic insult than white potatoes. But even better, when potatoes are cooked and then chilled in the refrigerator for 24 hours, the glycemic index goes down substantially. Boiled red potatoes, chilled and then eaten the next day, can have a glycemic reading as low as 56.

As I understand it, this is not simply because the potatoes are cold. It’s that, as the starch is chilled, the starch chemistry changes its structure so that it’s slower to digest. I believe this change persists even if the potatoes are reheated.

I keep seeing references to new types of low-glycemic potatoes developed by agricultural universities. But so far I have not been able to find a source of these potatoes, either as produce or as seed potatoes for planting.

Carolina church supper potato salad

Popovers

The best popovers, to be sure, are made with white flour. They’re light, buttery, and crisp around the edges. But it’s possible to make perfectly decent whole wheat popovers. I use the austere popover recipe from the 1943 wartime edition of Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking. Rombauer includes several variations on popovers in this edition, including the standard light and poppy version. The whole-wheat wartime recipe uses one egg, a cup of flour, and a cup of milk. Soy milk works fine. Yep, they’ll rise, if you beat the egg well enough. When they’re done, be sure to prick them with a knife or fork to let the steam out.

Whole-wheat sweet-potato gnocci

Gnocci with toasted walnuts, tempeh, and mushrooms. This is a very meaty dish … hard to believe that it’s vegan.

For those days in which you walk in circles in the kitchen trying to think of something a little different to cook, consider gnocci.

Gnocci, I believe, are considered tricky to make. I don’t think so. Any cook who is experienced working with dough will understand making gnocci. If you Google, you’ll find lots of tips and recipes from the experts, which I am not. However, I do strongly believe that you don’t need egg in the dough. Just two ingredients — potato and flour — work fine.

Gnocci are usually boiled. They also can be browned in oil, which is how I made gnocci today. Sweet potato gnocci particularly like to be browned in oil, I think, because the sugar in the potatoes gives the gnocci skins a nice, chewy texture.

The dough: nothing but sweet potatoes and whole wheat flour

Sliced and forked

Sizzlin’

The coffee of yesteryear

Buffalo china cups, Victor mugs

Those enormous coffee mugs and gigantic paper coffee cups are symbols of the rat race. Once upon a time, it was understood that a cup of coffee was something to relax with and savor. The drinking vessels reflected that.

There is a science, of course, behind the new style and the old style of coffee drinking.

The science of the new style is simple: Get all the coffee you’re going to drink into a single vessel, and chug it fast while on the run. Still, it’s guaranteed that the first third of it will be too hot, and the last third will be too cold.

The science of the old style was much more complex and sophisticated. It required skill and attention from whoever was serving the coffee. The drinking vessels were made of heavy china. The cups absorbed heat from the first pouring of coffee, cooling it to a more drinkable temperature. Thereafter, there was the ritual of “warming up” the coffee, which required pouring more coffee at just the right time, before the cup was empty. This not only refilled the cup, it also brought the coffee back to the ideal temperature. This ritual was repeated until you’d had enough coffee. This is how the English serve — or at least used to serve — tea from a teapot.

To my lights, the ideal coffee mug was the mug made by the Victor Mug Company. This mug holds about 8 ounces when filled to the brim, or about 7 ounces when filled to a drinkable level. The ideal coffee cup was made by the Buffalo Pottery Company. These cups hold about 7 ounces when filled to the brim, and about 6 ounces when filled to a drinkable level. These mugs and cups were sold as restaurant china. They’re now collectable.

When looking for cups in the housewares section of a couple of chain stores, I was not terribly surprised to find that they don’t even carry cups and saucers anymore, and all the mugs are huge. eBay is the answer.

I really feel for the people who have to drink their coffee from huge vessels, on the run. Now that I’m retired, I drink coffee (well, a coffee substitute) the old-fashioned way. I used my large set of Victor mugs during my working years. But now I’ve slowed down to cups and saucers.

Potassium broth

Now that I’m back on the cold and snowy East Coast, I’m remembering how good it is to have an arsenal of warm drinks. How about a bit of old-fashioned broth?

It was from Jethro Kloss, in the hippy handbook Back to Eden, that I first heard about potassium broth. Kloss’ version of potassium broth included oats and bran to give the broth extra body. He frequently prescribed it for people who were sick and couldn’t handle solid food. If you Google for “potassium broth,” you’ll find many versions. They all involve fresh vegetables, peels and all, simmered for four hours or so and strained.

The broth I made today included a beet, a turnip, a couple of potatoes, some celery, onions, turnip leave stems, collard stems, and the outer leaves from a cabbage. It’s still simmering, but I think I will add some tomato paste to the broth after I’ve strained out the vegetables, to make it taste more like vegetable soup.

It seems a waste to strain the broth and discard the vegetables, but I’ll drink the electrolytes, and my chickens will be happy to get the pulp.

Biscuits vs. rolls

Biscuits and rolls are so similar, and yet so different. They’re not interchangeable. Who would want rolls and gravy and scrambled eggs?

There’s one way that rolls win hands down: they’re healthier. The shortening adds a lot of fat to biscuits, and the soda or baking powder is a big hidden source of sodium. Biscuits are quick, though.

Still, I think you can make perfectly decent rolls in 90 minutes or even a little less. Just let them rise once, in the baking pan. I think rolls have a better texture if they have no oil in the dough at all.