I love bread. However, with the nutrition approach Liz has adopted you’re supposed to soak all grains overnight in an acidic liquid before consuming/cooking them to break down phytic acid. The conventional (if you can call it that) method is to add a few tablespoons of cultured whey to act as a starter and get lacto-fermentation going to generate the acid. However, I don’t like the flavor the whey adds. To make it worse, most of my recipes for homemade bread don’t include an overnight soak/rise.
Sourdough, on the other hand, essentially is an overnight soak because it can take all night to rise depending on your starter. Unfortunately, I’ve not had great success getting sourdough to produce the results I wanted without cheating and adding commercial yeast, mostly because I tend to let the starter go too long between uses.
However, I’ve found an alternative that seems to work very well for me. In an attempt to break myself of the Diet Coke habit, I started brewing “water kefir,” aka “tibicos” – a fizzy pro-biotic drink brewed with a Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast (SCOBY) kind of like kombuscha but using a different starter culture and sugar water instead of tea. The end result of the brewing is a mildly acidic liquid rich in lacto-bacteria and yeasts like a sour-dough starter, but with more pleasant flavors and more than one use (I like to drink it straight, kinda like a carbonated unsweetened or lightly sweetened lemonade). Because I use it as a regular drink, I haven’t had trouble with killing it from lack of use, and I pretty much always have a bottle or two in the fridge.
Now for the recipe… Start the recipe the day before you want the bread. The rise-time for me always seems to take at least 8 hours, and most of the time it’s more like 18.
- 4 C Water Kefir
- 1 Tbs unrefined sea salt (should be gray or pink)
- 3 eggs (pasture raised in your back yard if possible)
- 1/2 C melted butter (from grass-fed cows if possible)
- 1/2 C malted wheat flour, 1/4 C maple syrup or 1/4 C rapadura sugar (optional)
- 9-12 C fresh-ground whole-wheat flour
Start with cold Kefir and mix in the sugar and salt. Melt the butter and whisk in the eggs until well mixed and add the eggs and butter to the Kefir. Add about half the flour and stir until smooth, then add the remaining flour (more if needed) and knead to make a moderately stiff dough (I do it by hand because I got tired of repairing stripped out gears in my KitchenAid, but a machine works well if you don’t abuse it like I tend to).
Once the dough is smooth and stretchy, shape it into 2 or 3 loaves and plop them into bread pans greased with lard, tallow, or butter (I don’t like any form of highly processed vegetable oil, and butter tastes better anyway). Grease the top of the loaves with butter. Cover loosely with plastic wrap leaving the cover loose enough to let the bread rise and let sit at room temperature overnight. If by morning the dough isn’t rising, place the loaves somewhere warm (I use my dehydrator set to about 100F) until they have doubled (anywhere from 1-6 hours). If they still haven’t risen, you have a choice to make. You can either bake them anyway and eat fairly heavy but delicious bread (what I usually do) or wait for the yeasts to finally take off. They will eventually, and with the acid in the Kefir, you don’t have to worry much about putrifying bacteria and the like. Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes or until it sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom of the loaf. Let it rest on a wire rack for 5-10 minutes, cut off a thick slice, smear thickly with butter, and enjoy!
Notes:
Water Kefir: look it up via your favorite search provider. There are several places that describe it and how to obtain a culture and brew it. I’ll eventually post something about how I make it, but no promises when. Sometimes I add fruit juice or pulp to the kefir to flavor it, and that adds a unique and generally pleasant flavor to the bread.
Unrefined Sea Salt: I use Celtic Sea Salt because I understand that it retains all of the minerals found in the seawater used to make it and that it is an excellent source of trace minerals. I suppose any kind of salt would work if that is what you have.
Pasture-Raised Eggs: Eggs from pasture-raised chickens have dark yolks and firm whites. I believe they contain higher levels of vitamins and minerals (particularly fat-soluble ones like A, D, and K2) than the eggs produced by factory-farm raised chickens, and know they taste better either way. If you don’t have chickens in your back yard, I feel sorry for you.
Butter (from grass-fed animals in particular): Butter is one of the best sources of vitamin K2 (as long as the animals making the milk are eating stuff containing chlorophyl), a substance that science is only just beginning to understand, but Winston Price without knowing what to call it tied it to strong teeth and excellent health including immunity from tooth decay and heart disease. Furthermore, I don’t buy the saturated fat and cholesterol scare tactics employed by modern medical practitioners. Their low-fat, low-cholesterol, low-taste diet seems to have gotten us worse off than our ancestors were on a high-fat nutrient rich naturally grown diet. See for example www.westonaprice.org. The research is quite interesting. Avoid margarine and other processed vegetable oils like the plague.
Malted Wheat Flour: I make my own by sprouting wheat berries until the baby-plant (not the furry rootlets, but the thing that will be grass if you let it grow much more) is about as long as the grain, throwing them in my dehydrator for a while at temps below 115F until they are crispy and sweet, then grinding them into flour. it adds a sweet, nutty flavor, and provides sugars for the yeast to digest.
Aside from messing with sheep, I spent the rest of the day finally painting the chicken coop and barn. Liz said she wanted a red barn. Wow, did she ever get one… You can’t miss it. I’ve been scraping little red flecks of paint off of my sunglasses for two days now. If I haven’t learned by now to not wear nice things when working outside or in the garage, I doubt there’s much hope for me.