Let's Bake Bread # 1 - The Starter (or Leaven)

Traditional Sourdough baking

Now, let's get into this process.

Wherever you live in the world, you can make sourdough. If you live in a humid climate such as Brisbane or Florida, great - those yeasties grow mighty quick in sweaty weather. But if you live in a cool, dry clime, don't worry, it will work for you too!

Summer is over in Bondi and the month of May sees the cool setting in. My bread is not tripling in volume any more and I need to wrap it in plastic wrap and a tea towel and put it near a warmer or heater to get a double rise, but it still looks and tastes fantastic.

That's the thing about sourdough - no two loaves are ever the same, as natural processes are the ones who do the work, and they decide how they're feeling on any given day!


Some people tend to overcomplicate the whole process: 26 steps over 24 hours and so forth. While there are a lot of steps, they are simple steps which require minimal effort (except the kneading). I’ve discovered a few tricks to make the process go quicker and smoother (plastic wrap is so helpful on cooler days!) – a little trial and error of your own will perfect the process!

What kind to make is an endless choice, I generally make half rye-half white sourdough, as rye has the most dietary fibre but lately I've been making wholemeal, but I always use organic flour. I've also made brioche with white flour and even blinis and pocket bread. My favourite thing to make is sourdough pizza, truly unbeatable - you will want to eat every bit of the crust! I will post some pizza photos when next I make some - which is quite regularly in our house! In fact, if it has yeast, then you can use sourdough starter to make it!

This process sounds complex, but take it a step at a time, and it is really quite simple. You’ll be doing it with your eyes closed before you know it!

Part A
Making your ‘starter’
You’ll need:
- 1 big bowl (ceramic, metal etc)
-1 cup Filtered water or a boiled water, warmish (just above lukewarm, around 50 degreesC) (Chlorinated tap water doesn’t work)
-1 cup organic plain white flour
-Wooden spoon
-Sterile glass jar of about 600-800g capacity
-Muslin cloth or paper towel (or plastic wrap if the weather is quite cool)
-Boiling water for sterilising (after the first week or two, you won’t need to sterilise your implements as the lactic acid kills everything foreign that enters its environment, but you will need to keep things pr etty sterile at the beginning as it matures).






















Above: Starter in its early bubbling stages
Method

1. Rinse bowl and wooden spoon with boiling water to sterilise.
   
2. Mix in bowl 1 cup flour, 1 cup water
   
3. Place into sterilised glass jar
   
4. Cover loosely with clean muslin or paper towel
   
5. Leave somewhere warm and airy, around fruit and veg and away from toxic chemicals such as cleaning products. The windowsill is a good place.
   
6. Check daily for ‘foaming action’. My first starter went crazy within 24 hours. Or it could take 5 days. What you are looking for is for the mixture to begin to bubble, a few at first and then lots of bubbles, which will look like (and smell like!) beer foam.

Feeding & Caring for your starter

1. When it starts to foam an d basically double in size, then you have life! But you have to keep it alive, especially in the initial stages. When your starter is hungry, it will be still and flat, with possibly a layer of greyish or amber coloured liquid on the top that will smell funny – like beer – but not ‘off’. This is called hooch, and it’s the by-product of the yeasties when they feed on the flour. It is actually alcohol!
   
2. The idea is to feed the starter before you see this ‘hooch’. The best time to feed it is once a day in the beginning stages. The time to feed is when it has stopped foaming and is just starting to recede in the jar and lose its bubbles.
   
3. Feed it by pouring HALF the contents of the jar into a clean, sterile bowl and mix in equal proportions of flour and water. Put this new paste back into an empty jar. The reason you remove half the starter before feeding is because the starter grows and doubles its weight – if you did n’t remove half of it the starter would overflow and keep growing until it covered your whole kitchen……!!!!
   
4. Discard the leftover (in a few days or weeks you’ll be using your leftover starter as yummy pancake batter but it’s probably not strong enough yet).
   
5. Continue feeding the starter in this way daily for around two weeks and it should be strong enough to b ake your first loaf. It’s a wait, but it’s worth it!
   
6. By this time it will be quite strong and you will not need to sterilise your implements any more, just keep using wooden spoons and make sure your bowls are nice and clean.
   
7. Keep your starter in a jar in the fridge – once it’s matured after a couple of weeks. It doesn’t need to fill the jar, half a jar or less will be enough to keep the generations going. There it will lie ‘dormant’ and you need only feed it once a week with a couple of tablespoons of flour and water.

Note: My first starter foamed and bubbled in 24 hours then decided to go out of action and I couldn’t revive it. Sometimes they begin quickly and run out of puff. Other times they start bubbling really slowly but if you keep feeding them they spring to life. You are dealing with living creatures here, and they set their own pace. It’s really trial and error to get a strong starter, but it’s not difficult. My third ever attempt is the starter I still use today. It’s about 12 months old. If you’re starter is starting to ‘limp’ (i.e you feed it and instead of bubbling a few hours later it is still and hooch-covered) there are things you can do to jump start it. The easiest method is to discard all but one or two tablespoons of starter and in a clean, sterile bowl, rapidly whisk the small amount of starter with a cup of warm filtered water to get the oxygen in, then mix in a cup of flour, pour into a clean jar and wait….)

Extra note: Clean any active starter off your benches, cutlery and dishes while it’s still wet – it turns to cement when it dries. You could tile your bathroom with it! In fact, in the pioneering days settlers plastered the walls of their homesteads with it!

Next Blog: Time to Bake!

To fast or not to fast?

After reading many studies, articles and blogs let me say there’s a lot out there about the benefits of fasting.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that not all fasts are the same.

Now this can be hard to believe because there are so many methods of fasting being promoted and they all claim to fix the same things – LDL cholesterol, IGF, blood glucose, brain cell growth etc. And indeed they all pretty much do, as far as current studies can reveal. It’s what they mess up that’s the question. 

There is a wide selection of fasts to choose from. Do I eat every 12 hours? One meal a day? Do I fast every other day? What about the 5:2 diet? Eat dinner only except weekends? Fast monthly, every three months? It’s enough to do your head in.

I want to make it simple. I’ve read nearly everything out there and I’m here to simplify it all. 

I would say that the biblical model of sporadic full fasting (either 24 hours monthly, or 3 days every 2-3 months) is the healthiest way to go.

The very popular paleo-evolutionary fasting (alternate day, intermittent, 20-hourly etc) known as intermittent fasting or IF, is the least healthy way to fast.

Regular fasting upsets hormones, circadian rhythms, cortisol and fertility. It makes you edgy and puts your body out of whack. But, perversely perhaps, it also fixes LDL cholesterol, IGF-1 and blood glucose, creates new brain cells and generally repairs the body.

“The effect of intermittent fasting on hormones and circadian rhythms is devastating. When one hormone-producing gland gets out of whack, you can bet that others will be negatively affected“ http://www.charlespoliquin.com/ArticlesMultimedia/Articles/Article/971/The_Pros_and_Cons_of_Intermittent_Fasting_.aspx

 

But if you still want to fast, you might be asking ‘do I have to choose one over the other? Fast or not fast?’ Not with Biblical-model sporadic fasting. 

The body can be seen as an engine. The purpose of fasting is to shut down the engine and then conduct repairs. IF is like constantly turning the engine on and off, on  and off, so the engine is constantly in a stretched state of stress. It may be being repaired but at the expense of its proper running, and soon the engine starts to go out of whack. Biblical fasting , on the other hand, only requires fasting every few months. So you turn the engine off, do the repairs, then turn the engine on again. As your rhythms are only out of whack for a few days, your system comes back on line and gets back to normal pretty quick.

That’s how God designed humans, to fast only sporadically. Thus we benefit from all of the repairs fasting enables our body to do to our cells, but we resume our normal eating patterns quickly after the fast and the body’s rhythms can return to normal and stay that way until he next fast in a few months’ time. It may not be the key to quick weight loss, but isn’t it better to be able to sleep regularly and get pregnant if you want? 

Intermittent fasting may be concomitant with fat loss but there are better ways to lose weight, ones which don’t affect your biorhythms permanently.

If you want to want quick weight loss, try the much healthier Vitality Diet (which I posted in the previous post) which is a version of the current CRON diet (calorie restriction with optimal nutrition). The Vitality diet was developed by Hauser over 80 years ago and is identical in many ways with today’s CRON diet, which comes in at 8000KJ per day, which is around 1000KJ under the recommended intake. 

The Vitality/CRON plan focuses on the maximum amount of nutrients for the least calories. We're not just talking the same amount of nutrients on less calories, I mean nearly twice your average daily nutrient intake for a few less kilojoules. That's why it creates such vitality, and not the false alertness and edginess that intermittent fasting creates.

Plus there's the weight loss benefits. Do the Vitality Diet for 10 days and you’ll lose about a pound a day. Then continue with a high-nutrient diet and occasional fasting and keep your protein at no more than 1g per kilo of bodyweight.

The CRON/Vitality diets also leads to lower IGF-1 and lower blood glucose. Patients also report slowed degeneration of organs, tissues and faculties (in balance tests CRONERS over 50 years of age tested as well as a 20 year old). The increase in nutrients plays a large part in this, not just the calorie restriction.

With intermittent fasting we are not focusing on high nutrients, instead constantly switching between fast and feast, which may give us most of the benefits of sporadic fasts but at the expense of our fertility (for women), hormones and biorhythms. 

Most people choose IF because they don’t have the willpower for 3-day fasts, but note that the UK program Eat, Fast, Live Longer pointed to research which promoted full but sporadic fasts over intermittent fasting. It may be harder, but it’s better for us. And really, some things are only worth doing if they’re hard. Trying to make fasting easy will just lead to upsets elsewhere in the system:

"And when you fast, don’t make it obvious, as the hypocrites do, for they try to look miserable and dishevelled so people will admire them for their fasting. I tell you the truth: that is the only reward they will ever get." Matthew 6:16