Tasty Bytes

Oh, yes I am still enamored with Jim Lahey’s no-knead bread. I’m on loaf number 6! Lucky for me I have friends and neighbors who love bread too – otherwise I would be out shopping for new clothes rather than writing this post.

I do love bread but am not so crazy about eating so much refined wheat flour plus grains can be hard to digest and in fact be anti-nutritive. The recipe I have been using so far is 1/3 whole grain – I do plan to try and up this to 50/50 on the next batch. If one examines native cultures – nearly all soaked or fermented grains before eating. Why would the native peoples go to all the trouble? If I asked my mother or grandmother why we soaked our rice before cooking it they would just smack the back of my head and say “Because that’s what you do, why are you asking so many questions?!”

We now understand that soaking and fermenting grains makes the grains more easy to digest and the nutrients more bioavailable. Further, grains have a compound called phytic acid, which bind to minerals while in our gut that are essential to our health – like calcium, magnesium, zinc, iron and copper. The long 18 hour fermentation of the no-knead dough certainly breaks down much of the starch (that’s what yeast like to grow on) along with some of the difficult to digest gluten. In addition, the fermentation process may deactivate the phytic acid but I wasn’t sure fermenting with a commercial baker’s yeast was enough to do the job.

How can we convert our crusty loaf, a refined carb, into a sour dough complex carb? By using an old fashion wild sour dough starter like our ancestors did. Wild starters like these not only have yeast but enzymes and lactic acid bacteria so you get a more complete fermentation. Besides, this was an excuse to revive some critters that have been lost on my desk in suspended animation for a better part of a year. Months and months ago, I sent away for a bit of Carl Griffith’s 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Starter. It came in a little sandwich bag and looked like some dried dough scraped up from the back of a covered wagon. No actually it looked quite benign. Sunday morning, I looked up the instructions to turn the old dust into a live sourdough starter by mixing it with flour and water. I was a little worried it wouldn’t be viable any longer as I had the starter for months sandwiched between piles on my desk – it was a miracle I even found it to begin with! Well to make a long story short – those tenacious little buggers sprang to life. On Monday I took a sniff and the cup of ‘sour dough batter’ smelled like a floury yogurt. Eureka! The Oregon Trail lives on in Oakland California! Yee Haw!

Today’s loaf came out tasting like a mighty fine sour dough – not quite like my favorite from Bay Breads but in the same ball park. Closer than I have ever gotten trying to make my own starter or even from starters I had used from some restaurants I had worked.

Here’s the recipe:
Mix together in a 3-4 quart bowl:

2 c King Arthur bread flour
1 ½ c Guisto’s medium whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons Redmond sea salt

Add:

1 c Carl Griffith’s 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Starter
1 c + a tablespoon or so of water – enough to make a sticky dough

Follow the rest of the instructions from this post “The Staff of Life”

Loaf number seven will come out of the oven tomorrow in time for the Thanksgiving table…and maybe for some turkey panini on Friday!

Next I will try upping the percentage of whole grain and work with spelt flour which tends to be an easier gluten grain to digest.

Happy Thanksgiving!