With spring in the air, dandelions in bloom, and seed planting up on us, I'm also dreaming of cooler drinks over hot ones.

While there is always room for a good cuppa hot tea in the morning, the warmer weather has me turning to iced and sun tea as well as cold, bubbly, kombucha. There is just something about that fizz that is refreshing after a hot day out in the garden.

In our family of 6, brewing kombucha with the batch brew method doesn't cut it. It just doesn't make enough tea for all the thirsty people in our house and so we use the continuous brew method for making our kombucha. Plus continuous brew kombucha is faster, easier, and simpler to make. 

What we eat and drink directly affects our immune system by way of our intestinal health. We truly are what we eat (and drink) and the quality of that food and drink has a huge impact on our immune system. There could be no truer quote regarding food and medicine than that from Hippocrates, “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.”
 
Kombucha, a fermented tea packed full of probiotics (good bugs for the gut) can attribute to making sure your gut is getting what it needs and in turn your immune system what IT needs. Adding herbs and spices to that mix just adds to the healthful affects on the body. Whether you are flavoring your first fermentation with herbs or the second fermentation, adding herbs and tisanes (herbal teas) will open up the flavor possibilities as well as the benefits of drinking kombucha.

Gut shots and kraut pounders. A couple of words I didn't think would probably ever enter my vocabulary until a few years ago. Doesn't sauerkraut just come in a jar? Isn't that, that stinky stuff that goes on roast beef sandwiches? Cabbage? Bleck! I wasn't a fan of sauerkraut in the least, at least the stuff that I saw at Costco being piled on hot dogs and the yellowish stuff out of a jar for on top of St. Patrick's day corned beef. And if your wondering what a gut shot is.... its kraut juice in a shot glass (just had to put that out there.) I'm here to tell you that REAL fermented sauerkraut doesn't taste like that stuff at all. Its actually good!

About 5-6 years ago I encountered traditional cooking. A way of cooking that uses traditional preparation methods for things like grains, vegetables and meats. Some of these methods might not seem so strange like dehydrating meat for jerky. Fermenting bread dough and vegetables was a new thing to me though. 

The fermentation process, whether it be bread our sauerkraut adds nutrition to the foods, helps to pre-digest some things our bodies are not so great at digesting and helps with our overall health. Live fermented vegetables add probiotics to our gut which helps us have healthy digestion. It is said that health starts in the gut!

These forms of food preservation were used until the Industrial Revolution making them quite normal in every day life. Over time that changed and these methods were lost and set aside. With so many gut related health issues in the news (think Chrons, IBS, ulcerative colitis) its no wonder that these traditional methods are coming back.

​So its time to throw out that jar of store bought kraut and meet the real stuff! 

2 medium to large green cabbages (purple cabbage works too, a bit spicier!)
9 tablespoons of good quality sea salt

1.) Remove the outer leaves of your cabbage to insure cleanness.

2.) Shred cabbage with a food processor shredding blade, knife, or traditional cabbage shredder.

3.) Add sea salt to shredded cabbage. Blend in well.

4.) Pound the cabbage to help speed the release of the the cabbage juices. When cabbage is juicy pack into a jar that kraut will fill to the top. You don't want any extra space in the top of your jar.

​5.) Place a fermenting weight on the top and a lid. Let fermented at room temperature for 3-7 days until you see bubbles and have a sour taste. Time frame will vary depending on the temperature in your house.

If you love spicy and hot things than kimchi is going to be the kraut for you! Ours is a little more low key than the traditional Korean stuff but a great place to start if you are not sure about kimchi .... or if your just not ready for that hot bright red stuff!

2 heads of green cabbage
9-12 tablespoons of good quality sea salt
3-6 carrots
1-2 daikon radishes
2-3 garlic cloves
Approx. 4 inches horseradish or to taste
2-3 tablespoons red pepper flakes

1.) Remove the outer leaves of your cabbage to insure cleanness.

2.) Shred cabbage, carrots, daikon radish, horseradish, and garlic with a food processor shredding blade, knife, or traditional cabbage shredder.

3.) Add sea salt to shredded cabbage & veggies. Blend in well.

4.) Pound the cabbage & veggies to help speed the release of the the cabbage juices. When cabbage is juicy pack into a jar that kraut will fill to the top. You don't want any extra space in the top of your jar.

We hope that you enjoy these simple sauerkrauts as much as we do! Feel free to try different veggies in either of these recipes. Caraway seed and dill might be great in the basic recipe and remind you a bit of dill pickles. Spice up the kimchi more or less according to your taste! Add some green onion or what ever suits your mood. 

If you would like to watch how we make sauerkraut we did a little video here with our 3 year old helping us out, complete with an end of fall farm update! See you  next time.

Cheers!
​CeAnne & Paul 

"The chief things for man's life is water and bread, and clothing, and a house to cover shame." Ecclesiasticus XXIX, 27. Today we are sharing our recipe for the staff of life, that foodstuff that man has had for thousands of years, bread. But in our day and age bread seems to be on the list of things not to eat. It seems there may be many reasons for that as the type of bread many tend to eat in our time is different from what use to be eaten. In our previous blog post on Milling At Home Joseph Husslein S.J. Ph D. shows how just by the way wheat is milled takes our "staff of life" and turns it into something other than a healthful food stuff. 

Going down Father Fahey's list of 12 Factors of Proper Nutrition we are going to touch on numbers 10 and 11 today with our sourdough tutorial: proper preparation of food and proper cooking of food.

What is so special about sourdough bread? According to the all knowing Wikipedia, "Sourdough is the fermentation of dough using naturally occurring lactobacilli and yeast." Prior to the use of commercial yeast (bread yeast typically purchased for bread making) sourdough starter was how families baked their daily bread. Sourdough starter uses a natural leaving that takes the naturally occurring yeast from the air when flour and water are mixed together. This is what makes the bread rise in a sour dough recipe. Most sourdough breads purchased or served in a restaurant do not use this method but add other agents to mimic the flavor of sourdough.

Why is all of this important? Sourdough starter not only makes the bread rise without having to purchase a commercial man made yeast but it also helps to make bread more nutritional. The lactobacilli (the yeasts and bacterias) digest the sugars in the wheat, they give off gas in the process making the bubbles in the starter/bread dough which make it rise. When these lactobacilli eat the sugars they are "pre-digesting" the bread for us which makes it easier for us to digest. It also prepares the nutrients in the wheat for us so that we get more out of our wheat than we would have had these bacteria and yeasts not started the job for us. This study from the US National Library of Medicine shows that souring the bead reduces gluten and may be helpful to those who are gluten intolerant. In our own personal experience we don't have the bloating that is associated with eating yeasted bread and the whole wheat sourdough also ties us over to the next meal much longer. When we have gone back to a commercial yeasted bread we feel as if we didn't eat much and continue to feel hungry, in return eating more.

So without further ado, we present our family sourdough recipe. This recipe has been a labor of love in the making for about 4 years. One downside to sourdough is that it isn't a scientifically made commercial yeast. Meaning that it isn't a straight forward consistent item to use in the kitchen. It has been said that sourdough making is an art and there are as many ways to use this lovely starter as there are recipes in Russia for borsch, recipes in the US for potato salad and recipes in Bulgaria for Shopska Salad (as every country has its dish! Our children are adopted from these…). With that I will say this recipe might not work for every starter and every situation but it is what has been working for our family for 6 months almost without fail after 4 years of many sourdough bricks! I must also send a thank you to all those family members who have helped give tips along the way! To my sister-in-laws, cousin and aunt who put up with all my questioning and probing. This recipe is a combination of all of those tips and much reading and research. 

~*~ Important to note that this recipe starts the night before I want to bake bread, more on timing options will be discussed at the end of this post.  ~*~

Step 1- Grind 6 cups Wheat or skip this step for pre ground flour
This recipe makes two large loaves. I grind about 6 cups of organic hard red wheat berries which I order from Azure Standard but any hard red wheat will do. If you are buying pre ground flour from the store (Winco, Roth's, Fred Myer) I would recommend getting Bob's Red Mill brand of whole wheat.

​To grind wheat please follow the directions that came with the mill that you have. We started out with a hand crank Wondermill Jr. mostly because we thought it would be great to have something that didn't require power. Then the official wheat grinder became tired and so we invested in our lovely electric wheat grinder, the Nutrimill, which we have had about 6 years now.

Step 2- Measure out 1 1/2 cups Sourdough Starter
After trying to make our own starter from scratch (just flour and water, feeding equal amounts for a week) we opted to just purchase a starter from Cultures for Health. In this tutorial we are using their Whole Wheat Desem Starter which has worked great for us. I've killed it twice I think but always save some, dehydrated, for back up. Either follow the directions for the Cultures for Health starter, make your own or get some from a friend. Perhaps another post will be up on all those details. For the purpose of this tutorial though have your starter ready to go, fed at least 1-3 days before. We like to keep ours in the fridge. I take out what I need then feed it equal parts flour and water enough to fill my canning jar and put it right back in the fridge.

Measure out 1 to 1 1/2 cups of sourdough starter into a large glass bowl (sourdough will eat stuff stuck in plastic bowls and metal is a debatable material).

Step 3- Add 2 cups flour, 2 cups purified water to the 1 1/2 cups sourdough starter

To the bowl which you placed your sourdough starter add 2 cups of your ground or bought whole wheat flour and 2 cups of filtered or purified water. City water/tap water won't work well for this as the chorine that is added and other chemicals isn't good for the sourdough starter and may kill the only thing you have to rise your bread. Mix until well incorporated. Let this set for 8-12 hours. I mix mine before bed about 9:30 pm the night BEFORE I want to bake. Then the lactobacilli have plenty of time to do their thing (eat those sugars and digest the gluten). At about 9:30 am the next morning I move on. This step takes about 5-10 minutes. I cover my bowl with an Uber lid or any reusable bowl lid that doesn't seal tight like these. I was using plastic wrap but when you make bread every day or every other day it just seemed like an unnecessary waste. A cloth towel works ok but in the summer fruit flies snuck their way in.

Step 4- Add 1/4 cup raw honey, 2 cups of filtered water, 2 tsp sea salt & 6-7 cups of whole wheat flour.

After the sponge (mix of water, flour, starter) has sat 8-12 hours I dump it into my Kitchen Aid mixer and add 2 cups of filtered water (again the starter likes pure water), 1/4 cup of raw honey (the best kind to use with the most nutrition, local if possible), and 2 tsp. of sea salt (we prefer RealSalt full of minerals and no additives). I give the mixer a little short run to blend that together then add my 6-7 cups of flour. The flour amount depends on how watery your starter was, how fresh your flour is (more flour if fresh less if bought) and the how warm or cold the weather is. The dough should be wet but shouldn't make a squishy should when you pinch it. Sourdough prefers a wet dough and you can usually add some later in the process but you don't want it too wet or the bread won't rise well. The fourth picture in the set above shows how it should look. This will probably be more wet than a dough that is made with yeast at this point. The whole wheat takes a while to soak up the water so it will need to be more wet.

Once you have your flour mixed in I rinse out the large bowl that was used for the sponge and give it a quick wipe down with a clean cloth napkin. Pour about 1 1/2 tbl. of oil in the bowl to grease it. Then transfer the dough from the mixer into that large bowl. I cover it with my Uber lid and let it sit about 4 hours. The timing on this will also depend on the warmth or coolness of the house. On cold days it might go longer than 4 hours though generally that doesn't happen with ours. On hot summer days I have to watch it, it could go in an hour or so. If its really cold sometimes it gets to snug close to the wood stove. It can also be placed in the fridge if the baker will be busy longer than 4 hours. (Read I ran to town and didn't make it back ;)  ). The coolness of the fridge will slowdown the fermenting process and give the baker some extra time.

At any rate, no matter your condition you are essentially looking for your dough to rise double in size for it to be ready.

Step 5- Knead dough, shape and place in bread pans.

After your dough has doubled in size (for me, the size of the bowl I use and my Uber lid this means when it pushes the Uber lid off the bowl). Once that happens I get out my trusty, could-not-do-without, Pampered Chef Pastry Mat (one of my favorite kitchen tools can you tell?!) I dump out my dough on an oiled mat (if my dough is too wet I use flour instead of oil) and use a pastry knife to cut my dough in half so I have equal parts for two loaves (or close to equal). 

I knead the dough, flattening it out and folding it over itself until it has a nice smooth elastic feeling to it. I estimate this takes less than 5 minutes for each ball of dough. The sourdough starter does such a good job at digesting the gluten that it almost kneads it for me. I usually knead one half let it rest while I knead the other. Let the second set rest while I shape the other into a loaf.

Once it is rolled and folded I tuck in the ends, flip it over and make sure the seam is sealed by pinching it together. Then rub some olive oil on the top to keep it from drying out and in the summer it keeps the fruit flies off. I grease my Good Cook Stoneware Bread pans with olive oil and place the shaped loaves in the pans to rise a second time. While the Good Cook Stoneware is working great for us they are wearing down on me after 4+ years and I have some Pampered Chef Stoneware Bread Pans on my wish list! Why stoneware? It cooks really well, very evenly, holds heat well, makes a nice crispy golden brown outside and its made natural materials that won't leach into the food that is baking in it. Just a few reasons we love stoneware!

Step 6- Bake both loaves at 400 degrees for 40 minutes.

For our average oven this tempature and time are perfect, every time. Everyones ovens are different though so a good tempature for bread is about 190 degrees on a meat thermometer. When the bread is done I remove it and then turn it out of the pan onto a baking rack to let it cool. I brush some olive oil over the top for a little less rustic look and it browns the top a bit while it cools.

​You could slice right away but the longer it has the cool the better. Hot bread (which is really hard not to cut right into!) will be super moist and will mush together when you try to cut it. A couple of hours would probably be the perfect amount of time to wait. This recipe makes a great sandwich bread. Its very hearty, healthy and simple!

Not everyone is home all day long to bake bread and I admit that timing was really a lot of what took me 4 years to figure this out. For those that work baking many loaves on a Saturday and then freezing them (pre sliced) would be an option. One could also place the dough while in the first rise stage (in the bowl before shaping) in the fridge and then take out when home from work to shape for the last rise. What ever schedule works for your family this bread is a healthful blessing!