• 15oz hard white spring wheat ground finely
• 13oz water
• 8oz sourdough starter
• 2t Celtic sea salt
• 1t sprouted wheat ground finely

Mix all the ingredients the night before (preferably with a recently refreshed starter). It helps to break the starter into numerous small pieces to mix into the rest of the dough. Knead with wet hands for a minute or so to incorporate the starter. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and store in the refrigerator overnight.

In the morning knead the dough with wet hands about 8-10 times until the ball is tight. Put the dough back into the bowl (big enough so it can double in size) and cover tightly with plastic wrap. Allow to rise till about 3:00pm. Longer is fine, but the longer it sits, the more sour it will be.

Take the dough out of the bowl and fold it over gently a few times. Shape it into a ball (find a nice description of how to do that on the web somewhere) making sure to get the outer skin tight or snug. Place the bread on parchment on a pizza peal or edgeless cookie sheet. Allow it to rise for another 2 hours or so till it is about double in size.

Place pizza stone on bottom rack. Place a cookie sheet full of water on the top rack. Preheat oven for at least one hour to 500°.

Slash the top of the bread in a plus pattern to about ½in deep. Quickly slide the bread onto the pizza stone. Close oven and reduce heat to 450°. Bake for 25 minutes. Turn 180° and bake for another 20-30 minutes. The bread is done if it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.

It takes some practice to get everything right. The only thing that isn’t quite right yet is the bottom is a little too dark. My technique will improve with time. I’m also still playing with the sprouted wheat flour hoping to speed rising time.

So… I went on a fermentation kick.

I finally got a sourdough starter going once again (and yes, that get’s baked so you loose the probiotic benefits, but the enzymes do help to predigest the grains). I’m following Peter Reinhart’s directions from his new Whole Grain Breads book. The basic sandwich loaf turned out pretty well, but I’ll reserve judgment till I make it a few more times.

I put up 3 quarts of lacto-fermented pickles one Saturday and another 3 quarts the next. The first batch had garlic, dill, and mustard (straight from the Nourishing Traditions recipe). The second batch had garlic, dill, peppercorns, and horseradish – don’t know how that’s going to turn out as it was an experiment. It’ll be another 4 weeks or so before I crack those open.

I put up a batch of ginger beer (see
Old-Fashioned, Healthy, Lacto-Fermented Soft Drinks: The Real “Real Thing”). The kids have been bugging me to do this for almost a year and I finally got the gumption to do it. They love this stuff. That will have to ferment for a couple weeks before I open the first bottle.

I even tried inventing a ranch dressing based on my cultured fresh buttermilk and homemade cultured mayonnaise, but it was rejected by the family. I guess I put in too much mustard and lemon juice. Oddly enough, this is the first ranch dressing I’ve ever liked. Maybe that’s because it doesn’t really taste like ranch.

And last, but not least, I bought a gallon of unpasteurized cider from a local orchard and it is now hardening on top of my refrigerator. Last year I found that 5 days was about right to get the flavor and kick I wanted.

One of these days I’ll get ahold of some kefir grains…

I have occasionally succeeded in making less sour bread by feeding my starter a lot and refrigerating the bread dough and things, but I finally decided to try culturing a new starter. I received Peter Reinhart‘s Crust and Crumb for Christmas, so I set about to follow his directions for a mild starter. The key for a mild starter is to have a very firm starter, more like bread dough. My starters in the past have all been more like pancake batter.

My old starter was cultured with rye flour from a bag – non-organic. Peter recommends using organic flour for at least the initial batch of starter since more yeasts and bacteria live on the surface of organic grains. This starter is made with my home ground wheat instead of rye.

I was really impressed when after 48 hours it was already doubling in size! This could be the best thing to happen to my bread yet. (The tape is the height it was when I put it in the cup.) By Sunday it should be tripling.

After taking out the dough and playing with it, I discovered that it was now a bit like pancake batter and didn’t stick together anymore. I over-kneaded it (a first for me)! I was about to throw out the dough and decided to see if I could make something useful out of it. So I let it sit for the rest of the day to ferment.

That night, I threw in some baking soda and baking powder, poured it out on an edgeless cookie sheet, and baked it. It spread out to about 1 inch thick. It was very tender – almost muffin or biscuit-like – and nothing like a yeast or sourdough bread should be. However, it had a very nice crust and nice flavor. We ate it up much faster than we usually eat a loaf of bread as it made a very nice munching bread.

Moral: Don’t throw out ruined dough.

The first step is to acquire a grain mill or some very fresh whole wheat flour. Whole grain flour goes bad very quickly and nutrient value is lost rapidly if the flour is not refrigerated or frozen. I managed to acquire a used Bosch stone mill for $30 on Ebay for my Bosch Universal Mixer. If you watch long enough you can find some pretty good deals on various used mills.

The next thing to be done is to make a starter (you might say you need to catch some yeasties and beasties). I followed the directions for this in Wild Fermentation (WF). I used rye flour for this since that is what Nourishing Traditions (NT) recommends. Different “recipes” have you adding different amounts of flour each day to get the starter going, but I once inadvertantly started one by simply leaving it out on the counter for 3 or 4 days. On day 4 when I looked at it it had filled the bowl and over doubled in size. NT has you adding a cup of flour and a bit of water every day for a week. I think WF has you adding a tablespoon per day. I think the key is to use only flour and water and wait till you get it bubbly or to significantly increase in size.

My next step was to follow Mike Avery’s guidelines on caring for your starter and his recipe’s requirement to switch the starter to wheat from rye. It’s easy to switch the starter. You simply start with a small amount of your rye starter (1-2 tbsp or so) and feed it a larger amount of the wheat flour and some water (so it’s about the consistency of thick pancake batter). This will also help to balance the starter so there is an adequate amount of yeast. If your starter gets too sour, it’s because you have too many lacto-bacteria and not enough yeast. This happens if you don’t feed it enough.

Continued in part 3…

The first time I tried cucumbers was a couple years ago. I put in the 2 tablespoons of salt as the recipe called for and I don’t think the fermentation ever took place. They were just really salty cucumbers. I declared the recipe to be a failure and only retried a few months ago. Then I reduced the salt to 1T + 1t. That worked, but some off flavors developed.

I later came to the realization that the first time I had used your average grocery store waxed cucumber and softened water and that one or the other had halted the fermentation. In my more recent reduced salt endeavor I had used some unwaxed salad cucumbers and unsoftened water.

So on this batch I went back to the 2T salt (for the carrots too). I tried them at the suggested 3 days (they’re sliced) and found that they still tasted too salty and not sour enough. So I let them sit a couple more days at room temperature. Now they have gotten the normal sour pickle taste and the sour balances out the salt. They’re actually quite good.

The lesson learned is that when room temperature is lower (as in the fall and winter), the fermentation will take longer.

For those not familiar with lacto-fermented vegetables, these are not your standard pasteurized vinegar-based pickles you buy in stores. They work on the same principle as yogurt or sourdough bread and are a fermentation using the critters already living on the pickles. The salt inhibits growth of the bad beasties and allows the growth of the good beasties. The good beasties generate lactic acid – which is where the sour taste comes from. Traditional pickles also are a probiotic. They also have loads of enzymes. This is the way our ancestors pickled.

I happen to have a copy of Wild Fermentation, which is a good introduction to the broad spectrum of fermentation, but I wanted something a little more comprehensive. So I came across the Handbook of Indigenous Fermented Foods.

It turns out that on Amazon it sells for about $250. Yikes! So I made a trip to the local library and discovered that they have an eBooks program. It’s free to sign up and now I’m sitting here in the comfort of my own computer room reading this book on-line.

The Cereals book has a good overview of the health reasons for fermenting grains, but it also has a good survey of different indigenous fermentation practices from different parts of the world. It’s probably not adequate for instructional purposes, but is a good place to start.