Newsletter April 2017 Sourdough and a Bad Dog

Email from a Reader

Hello Sharon,
Thank you so much. We received the Baker’s Sampler yesterday.

So far, we sampled the chocolate bread (yay dessert), gingerbread (I really enjoyed the clove) & English muffin-cinnamon (toasted- cut in half as disks, slathered in yes, pasture-raised butter).

Your newsletter post about including animal fat in the bread was super-inspiring. The fat lends a singular satisfying element.

When I was a child, we would visit Argentina and have "factura" which are tea time pastries made of bread and tallow and sugar topped with quince jam or a custard. OMG

In my most recent baking exploits, 2 sourdough & 1 bread event slowed things down:
1. Jasper my redbone coonhound dog got into a batch of sourdough
2. I neglected to feed a starter and got mold :(
3. Jasper ate a full pan of bread.

Jasper is the quintessential "bad dog" when it comes to food.
Worse than a chocolate lab.



I finally baked a loaf again. This loaf was a full-on buckwheat starter with milk kefir whey, coconut flour, salt, eggs, bacon drippings & chicken schmaltz (chicken fat). I forgot to add both chia and flax seeds. It was still a success.
Half is frozen, half is high above out of any possible dog reach.

My prior successful bread batches consisted of:
teff starter made with milk kefir whey
coconut flour
olive oil
flax & chia gels
bacon drippings

I baked these uncloched (uncovered) and they became very DENSE biscuits.

The next trial, Round 2, baked up softer, given that I used a cloche (cover).

On another note,  I am using Milk Kefir to boost my starters because it seems to be beneficial for me. Also, I have not had great success with water kefir. Also, my kombucha seems too sugary.

Joyous, delicious baking to you :)
C.

Hello C,
Thanks for your feedback of my Baker’s Sampler so far. Also thanks for the interesting and humorous stories of your baking adventures. It is obvious to me that Jasper is a well educated dog as he truly enjoys the benefits of sourdough starter as well as the finished bread.

Sorry to hear your starter got mold. Gluten-free starters are more delicate than wheat or rye starters and need to be fed regularly to prevent spoilage.

I’m so glad you found my animal fat post inspiring. I hope more people will come around to the possibility that animal fat builds health rather than hurts it. It is a good source of energy that digests slowly, reducing hunger. Using animal fat is also a good way to rotate your diet rather than eat the same fats all the time. (Food rotation is important for people healing leaky gut. Everything in moderation, of course.)

One questions about Factura, the Argentinean tea time pastries made of bread and tallow? Could you taste the tallow or did it blend into the pastry? I never noticed a tallow or lard taste in my breads or cookies when I use it. However, sometimes when I use a soup fat that had been heavily seasoned, the taste of the seasonings goes into the fat, and then into the bread, giving it some delicate, savory spice.

I found your buckwheat-coconut flour bread very interesting as far as flour combinations. I always think of buckwheat making a very spongy bread that tends to be dry without enough water in the starter. I also think of coconut flour as a super absorbent flour with a tendency to be dry without enough oil in the finished product.

In my experience, using those flours together might make a severely dry bread. However, the oil, bacon fat and eggs would help balance any density as would chia and/or flax gel.

I must try this combination the next time I experiment. The bonus is that I could use up a trifle of the enormous amount of fat in my freezer.

Sometimes I use a “cloche” or cover for the breads during baking and really appreciate the soft top it gives. Other times I like the slightly crusty tops. Cloches can be oven-proof glass, clay, (sometimes people use clean flower pots), or a simple metal baking pan placed over the bread pan.

I’m glad to hear the milk kefir is working well for your starters. For those who are unfamiliar with milk kefir, it is a culture that will ferment milk into a yogurt-like product. The actual combination of bacteria and yeast are different than yogurt cultures so the taste and texture are different than yogurt.

In my early gluten-free sourdough experiments, I used it as a booster and saw that it gives a bit more lift than water kefir-boosted starters. Unfortunately, I had to give it up because I couldn't tolerate it. I continued making it for my family, though, making milk kefir liquid for morning hot cereal as well as milk kefir cheese. I would snitch a bit as I made the cheese. I really loved the sour, creaminess of the milk kefir cheese.

I would make the milk kefir, which means adding the kefir culture to the milk and let it sit on the counter until it separated. For cheese, I would pour it into a strainer lined with a cloth, tie up the cloth and let the whey (water) drip out.  Depending on how long it hung and how much whey dripped out, I could make yogurt, cream cheese or farmer cheese. The whey was excellent for boosting starter or just drinking as a probiotics tonic.


 Milk Kefir separating
   
Milk Kefir strained with a metal strainer for cheese. The whey drips into the bottom of a bowl for other uses.
If you are interested in trying Milk Kefir, here's a link to an excellent company to purchase the culture. Cultures for Health

Thanks again for your feedback and sharing!
All the best,
Sharon

I received a follow up from C about how the taste of the animal fat blended right into the factura pastries from Argentina.
 

Free February Newsletter

February Newsletter

This month features:
"Throw-together Pancakes" using leftover frozen starter and whatever flours are left in the fridge.

Soft Food
I needed to have some dental work a few weeks ago and needed a whole week of soft food. Using my blender I transformed nutrient dense, highly digestible and tasty food into sustaining mush. It's not so much about the blending but about the food choices.

Photos of bakers' successes!

Here's the link: Newsletter

Enjoy!

The Lineage of my Gluten-free Sourdough Starter

When people think of sourdough starter lineages they often think of the famous San Francisco or Alaska starters originally brought over from Europe. I imagine the people who brought starters along with them were courageous people looking for a better life. I imagine they dehydrated their starters in the old country and carried small amounts of it in pouches or tiny clay pots carefully tucked into whatever belongings they could carry with them in the boats. When they got to the land of opportunity it is said their bread starters took on a new flavor, the flavor of their new locale. Hence the fame of the San Francisco or Alaska sourdough flavors.

I first learned to make sourdough using an old-fashioned 7-day rye bread recipe. It was a goopy, no-knead recipe that produced a rich, malty, dense loaf. The starter was built over seven days, yielding a giant bowl of sponge-like starter. When it was time to assemble the breads rye flour, water and salt were incorporated into the starter. This “goop” was then spooned into the loaf pans as this bread did not stand up by itself, it needed “walls” to hold it up. It was so sticky that the less handling involved, the better the finished product.

When I began to work with gluten-free starter possibilities I used this spongy, goopy technique as a guide and after a year of many failures, had great success while incorporating a few important changes through trial and error:

• extra daily feedings to prevent spoilage
• boosting and preserving it with a bit of an old fashioned fermented drink, water kefir.

I found the starters to be rather delicate and did not regularly store well. I found that I could easily begin a new starter so using it up was never a problem. In fact, I found the fresh starters resulted in breads having a consistently fresh taste while the stored refrigerated starters often carried some “off tastes” I associated with over-fermentation. The over-fermentation also seemed to result in less than satisfactory leavening.

This sponge-goop technique is very different than wheat sourdough techniques that benefit from extensive kneading and shaping. Unlike their rye counterparts traditional wheat breads also stand up, rise and bake without the support of the walls of a loaf pan.

Some seasoned wheat sourdough bakers have had poor success with my technique when they apply their years of experience with wheat sourdough to my rice starter. They expect to take a small amount of starter and knead large amounts of flour into it, shape it, let it rise and bake it. My technique, however, is the opposite. I grow a large amount of high-moisture starter by feeding it at least twice a day. I then stir in a small amount of flour and pour or spoon it into a loaf pan or muffin tin. From there I let it rise and then bake it.

I think the main reason the wheat technique doesn’t work for my recipes is that my technique was originally derived from the 7-day sourdough rye sponge-goop technique which is really quite different than the wheat technique.

One definition of lineage is “the descendants of one individual”. The descendants of the San Francisco and Alaska sourdough starters are available for sale and supposedly retain some of that “genetic” material referring to the local bacteria and yeasts that grow in the starter. When one purchases those starters they know the lineage of their starter.

I don’t sell starters, I sell a technique. I think about my technique as a “technical” lineage, much like a technique or practice handed down from teacher to student, or master to apprentice. My “technical lineage” is a descendent of the 7-Day Sourdough Rye Technique.

I am deeply grateful for the people willing to try my technique because in addition to feeding ourselves we are also keeping alive a technique that could easily be forgotten in these modern times. We keep it alive by learning it, practicing it, feeding our families with it and teaching it to others.

We successfully unite the past with the future when we reclaim an old-fashioned technique like 7-day rye sourdough and successfully, and palatably, use it to address the modern dietary challenges of gluten intolerance.

Gluten Free Sourdough Bread as an Intuitive Art

After nearly 4 years of gluten free sourdough experimentation and observation I can now intuitively work with the never ending variations that emerge during the sourdough process. Much like people, every gluten free sourdough starter is unique. They respond to temperature, humidity, air flow, and miniscule differences in measurements.

Lately, I’ve become so adept at this kind of baking that I can “correct’ the starter or bread dough as I move through the tasks rather than dutifully following the recipe and ending up with a brick.

I can tell by the smell of the starter if it’s fermenting too quickly and needs to be fed more often. I can tell by the density if more flour blending is necessary. In a heat wave I can correct before over-fermentation sets in. The way the pizza dough comes together tells me if I need more arrowroot flour to attain that stretchy doughy quality. The quality of sponginess of the nearly finished bread batter tells me if it needs more ground flax seed.

My hope is that people who bake my bread will get a feel for working with a gluten free starter and the resulting dough so that they can correct as they go. My other hope is that they will be brave enough to try variations so that they can turn my bread recipes into their favorite breads. I love when people tell me they experimented with dried cherries instead of raisins and sage rather than coriander or used mini loaf pans instead of muffin tins.

My new motto is “Go forth and bravely bake!”.