Sourdough, beautiful sourdough

We love sourdough.  We use our starter several times a week, for breads but also other sourdough treats like pancakes and cookies.  We've basically converted all our baking to sourdough now, because we love the process, the flavours, the forgiving nature of timing when baking with sourdough, and most importantly the fact that the baked goods are more healthful and digestable for us.  Here are some photos from our recent sourdough class.  And a spring wood-fired cob oven baking class is coming up in May, for those of you who wish to learn to bake with FIRE!

Seeds, Soil, Sourdough Event - Sat, April 23 from 10 am-1 pm at Little City Farm

Celebrate spring, Earth Day, and International Permaculture Day by joining us at Little City Farm for our annual Seeds, Soil, Sourdough Event!  Sat April 23, 10-2 pm.

Celebrate spring/planting season, Earth Day, and International Permaculture Day by dropping by Little City Farm on April 23. Free demos & mini tastings: learn about building with cob & strawbale construction hands-on pollinator-friendly seedball making lacto-fermented kraut tasting and take-home recipes wild greens smoothies tasting (with nettles & dandelion greens) permaculture info & resources To purchase in our pop-up "farm store": organic non-GMO seeds for your garden plantings organic potting soil to start your seedlings organic sourdough bread, organic pies to take home wood-fired savory crepes for lunch! organic gardening resources, books and more handmade soaps & herbal salves Self-guided tours of the Little City Farm "urban homestead": This property is a work in progress.  See home-scale permaculture-inspired  projects such as hugelkultur chickens & bees composting area vermicomposting cob wood-fired oven strawbale house natural construction greywater pond passive solar greenhouse edible landscaping pollinator-attracting plantings herb areas, kitchen garden permaculture zones Little City Farm is located at 508 Duke St West, Kitchener. Please walk or cycle if possible!  Bicycle parking on our driveway.  More more info contact Karin at: 519-575-9174  / or  / info@littlecityfarm.ca

Baking Whole Grain Bread with Children

What a fun workshop we had here today!  Thirteen eager kids (aged 4-12) were over to learn about baking bread: working with sourdough, kneading and shaping their own loaves, making their own sourdough starter culture, grinding whole grains into flour, and baking the loaves in our wood-fired cob oven!  We talked about breads from around the world, and what makes up bread (flour/grain, water, salt and yeast - and heat!).  And there was lots of bread eating, laughing, creating, more eating, and playing - not to mention lots of flour and dough everywhere!   Hands-on learning is always so inspiring to watch - we see the transformation of words and ideas into tangible knowledge that is learned through tactile experience (ideally using all the senses like today - taste, smell, touch, etc - as the ideal way to let a new concept really sink in). We hope to offer more bread classes (for kids and adults) again soon. 

Spring Seeds, Soil & Sourdough Event at Little City Farm, April 18

Join us Sat, April 18 between 10-12 noon (free drop-in event) for our first ever Spring Seeds, Soil & Sourdough Event!

We invite you to celebrate the arrival of spring, earth-day, and all good growing things that come with sunshine and warmer weather!

You will find:

• Seedballs: hands-on DIY seedball making (make your own clay seedballs to take home, filled with seeds to attract pollinators to your garden) - a great activity for all ages
• Seeds: organic non-GMO seeds for sale to get your garden off to a great start
• Soil: bags of certified organic potting soil for sale for all your seed starting needs
• Seedling Tips: helpful advice on starting your own seedlings, planting charts to take home, garden magazine give-away, and more
• Sourdough: freshly baked sourdough bread available, and wood-fired baking demo in our outdoor cob oven
• Soap: natural handmade soaps for sale
• Sprouts: in our new greenhouse studio space (still under renovation but we'll give you a sneak preview)!

Please try to walk or bike to this event, in honour of earth-day and to minimize traffic on our street.

For questions - contact Karin or Greg at: info@littlecityfarm.ca
 

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New Favourite Sourdough Bread

We are back to making our weekly sourdough and oh, how we love baking bread.  Usually our daughter makes her own mini loaves and loves to embellish them with seeds, nuts, spices, fancy patterns on the top, or just turn them into fun shapes.  We love the children's book Suzie's Sourdough Circus, by Kathy Sager, which is actually an entertaining story that clearly and creatively describes what is happening during the sourdough process (in the words of the little sourdough critters, they say "food scrumptious food, we forget all our troubles.  Eat it all up, and then we blow bubbles.  This is a sourdough starter celebration!  We sing and we dance in wild fermentation!").  In the back of the book are several amazing recipes (like sourdough bread, sourdough pancakes, and sourdough marbled chocolate cake which makes a superb birthday cake).  We've been using her sourdough bread recipe lately.  It's a new favourite - so dense yet moist, and nicely works it's sourdough magic overnight so we can take our time fitting bread making into our busy life.  Our latest family winter favourite snack is fresh sourdough bread spread with tahini and apple butter - yummm!

Sourdough Workshop

We had one of our regular Saturday homesteading workshops here today.  This was the third workshop of a four-part "cultured kitchen" series which included four classes about creating live cultured foods at home - sauerkraut/kimchi, yogurt making, and sourdough bread (and apple cider vinegar is coming in the fall).

During today's workshop we walked through the steps of making and maintaining a sourdough starter, proofing the starter before bread baking (at least 8-12 hours), making the dough, and shaping loaves.  We were working with real sourdough (not preferments or recipes that use commercial yeast) - so ingredients are basic and wholesome - organic hard bread flour, cool filtered water, sea salt, and wild yeast!  The process really is quite simple, it's just a matter of making it part of a regular rhythm of your own weekly kitchen activities. 

Participants made their own sourdough starters to take home (which now need to be fed for the next 10 days, and maintained after).  We also sampled two sourdough breads I had made the night before, so that participants could see the full range of bread making from start (starter) to finish (eating) but still fit this all - a normally 2 day experience - into a 2 hour class.  We tried sesame caraway rye (made with a 100% organic rye starter); and wholegrain country sourdough loaf with millet & sunflower seeds.  Here are photos of the bread baking after today's workshop. 

DIY Beeswax Wraps

We love these beeswax wraps!  They have so many great uses, and can replace any situation where you might have used plastic wrap before.  No more plastic wrap on food, no more plastic wrap to throw away.  For example, we wrap lunch sandwiches, halves of apples, blocks of cheese stored in the fridge, and to cover mixing bowls when proofing bread.  The beeswax wraps are slightly water proof and breathable.

Cleaning: These beeswax wraps can be used almost indefinitely, and if they do need cleaning just rinse gently with cool water and a biodegradable dishsoap or wipe with cool cloth, then let air dry (do not wash with hot water as this may melt the beeswax coating).

Note of caution: Making your own beeswax wraps at home is quite simple.  The key is to keep an eye on your oven temperature and not leave the cloths in the oven too long.  This is important since the hot wax in your oven could become a fire hazard. Work carefully, and in less than half an hour you will have your own set of beeswax wraps!  These beeswax wraps make great gifts as well. 

You will need:

• A large piece of natural unbleached un-dyed fabric (e.g. cotton, linen, hemp)
• Pure beeswax
• Old baking trays
• Parchment paper
• Old grater or knife to cut beeswax 
• Old paintbrush (reserved for beeswax from now on)

a) Cut piece of natural fabric to the size you want - it needs to fit on a baking tray.  Consider sizes that will be small or large enough to wrap the foods you have in mind (e.g. sandwiches, fruit, to cover a mixing bowl, etc)

b) Decide if you want to serge or sew the edges of the fabric to prevent fraying.  The beeswax will also prevent fraying so it just depends on how "finished" you want your wrap to look.

c) Line baking tray with parchment paper and lay cloth flat on this tray.

d) Preheat oven to 170F (NO hotter as this can become dangerous!).

e) Shred or grate beeswax.  You will need to have a thin layer across your entire cloth.  This amounts to several tablespoons of grated was for a medium sized cloth.

f) Sprinkle beeswax across the cloth evenly.  

g) Put baking tray into the oven at 170F for 10 minutes - NO LONGER than that!  Keep an eye on the melting wax.  If the was has melted sooner than 10 minutes remove baking tray earlier.

h) While wax is still hot spread it across the cloth with the old paintbrush.  Try to get a skim coat across the entire cloth.  

i) Let cool.  Beeswax will dry and harden slightly.  Then the beeswax wrap is ready to use!

j) You can add button and string loop closures, or other cloth or string fasteners onto the edges if you want to have a way to secure the cloths.  We just fold them around our food and secure with a rubber band.

Favourite Sourdough Bread

We finally have a weekly ritual of making sourdough bread.  We've tried so many ways of baking bread over the years, from traditional yeast breads with lots of kneading, to artisan breads in "5 minutes a day" method, to unleavened breads, to biga and pre-ferment breads, to several-day-multiple-stage-elaborate sourdough breads.  Since we love to play around with ferments (kimchi, crock pickles, kombucha, beer making, wine making, yogurt making...) we really do enjoy the sourdough process the best.  However, we needed a version that was simple enough to follow with only a handful of steps, with a little kneading and shaping but lots of slow rising time that is flexible, functional yet with an artisan look and taste, and one that can be adapted with wholegrains and lots of seeds, and most importantly that can easily be incorporated into a family's life.  I think we've found it.  And best of all, if we don't have time to bake bread on a given week, we simply feed the starter as usual but use it to make sourdough pancakes (from our favourite recipe in the Tassajara Bread Book).

Our version of sourdough bread is based on a recipe for Country Sourdough Bread in a great book called Baking Bread with Children.  It's a Waldorf-inspired baking book that incorporates loads of ideas on how to engage children in the tactile process of working with dough - including stories, legends, songs, poem and rhymes about bread, lots of simple recipes (including yeast breads, quick breads, and a few sourdough breads), and also information on how to build a wood-fired pizza oven and use it with children.  Since we already have a well-used and much loved wood-fired cob oven we especially enjoyed seeing this section of the book among all the delicious recipes.

Speaking of fantastic kids books that talk about sourdough, here is another fun one-of-a-kind kids book that has made it into our collection - Suzy's Sourdough Circus.  It uses a circus analogy to explain how the wild yeast makes the bread rise, and their website is packed full of information such as recipes and where to source a sourdough starter from someone near you (called "the sourdough share")!

We're certainly not experts in the sourdough bread process but we have developed this recipe that is simple, straight-forward and works well for us.  Here's our wholegrain sourdough bread version.  All books mentioned above have good instructions for how to make your own sourdough starter to get going with this process.  Below are photos of several of our recent loaves!  We love adding sunflower and sesame seeds.

Sourdough Bread

Ingredients:
5 cups hard bread flour or combination of wholegrain flours
1/2 cup wholewheat bread flour
1/2 cup rye flour (adding some rye gives bread the extra "chewy" texture)
2 cups filtered water (at room temperature)
1 cup sourdough starter (ideally reserved from previous batch of bread or pancakes)
1 Tbsp sea salt

Step 1 - Mixing the Sponge:  Mix the 1 cup sourdough starter with 2 cups water and 3 1/2 cups of the bread flour or wholegrain flours.  Let sit overnight in a cool place (let sit at least 8-12 hours).  It should be bubbly and tangy smelling when it's ready to use.

Step 2 - Feeding the Starter: Now add the remaining 1 1/2 cups of bread flour or wholegrain flour, plus 1/2 cup wholewheat bread flour and 1/2 cup rye flour.  Then stir well.  Take 1 cup of this dough and store it in a glass or ceramic jar in the fridge.   This is your sourdough starter for your next batch of bread!  It should be used every week in order to maintain it.

Step 3 - Mixing the Dough:  Add 1 Tbsp sea salt.  Stir in more flour if necessary to make a firm dough but be careful not to add too much at once as you don't want the dough to become too dry.  There should be just enough flour added to keep the dough from sticking to your hands and the table.  Knead for 10 minutes to help dough become elastic and develop strong gluten fibres which help the bread to rise.

Step 4 - Rest Dough & Shape Loaves: Let dough rest for 15 minutes, covered with a damp cloth.  Then divide into 2 loaves and shape into rounds or oblong.  Stretch and fold the dough, roll it up tightly into a log and sealing the seams underneath.  Coat with flour to keep from sticking.

Step 5 - Rising: Cover with damp cloth and let loaves rise on oiled or floured baking sheet for 2-3 hours (depending on air temperature and humidity) until they have doubled in size. 

Step 6 - Preheating Oven & Baking: Preheat oven to 450F.  When loaves have risen to double in size (and oven is preheated) score the top of each loaf with a sharp knife.  This allows the bread to expand without bursting.  Bake for 5 minutes at 450F, then reduce heat to 400F and bake for another 30-35 minutes until bread is golden brown and sounds hollow when tapped.*  Let cool, then slice.

*A great way to bake bread with delicious crispy crusts is to bake directly on a ceramic pizza stone, or by adding a roasting pan underneath where a cup of hot water can be added to bring steam into your oven.  We love using our outdoor wood-fired cob (clay) oven since the breads get a very dark crispy crust from baking on a stone hearth with the high heat we can use from the firing.

Variations:
- add small amounts of other wholegrains such as millet, oats, barley, buckwheat...
- add raisins or cranberries, apple slices and cinnamon...
- add other seeds (sunflower, flax, sesame, pumpkin), or nuts (walnuts, pecans), or dried fruit...
- add leftover moist grains such as cooked rice, cooked oatmeal, cooked millet 

Cob Baking workshop - build your own earth oven

We hosted a workshop on cob and baking in wood-fired ovens today.  For those who are new to cob, it's a traditional building material made of clay-sand-straw mixture - very similar to adobe - and makes gorgeous ovens, walls, even homes!  Talking about cob and baking together creates a nice parallel story - both cob and breadbaking have so much in common.  They are both highly variable processes that are hands-on, flexible based on many varying factors (temperature, humidity, ingredient composition), and above all, something to be played and experimented with.  Each person will have their own variations, own techniques, own style - all leading to beautiful results.  With doing a little work ahead of time, we managed to bake two varieties of wholegrain sourdough bread by the end of our 2 hours - one that had aged for 10 days already (a nice sour tangy flavour) and one that was actually a biga (an Italian starter culture that only takes a 3 day ferment).  Highlights of the workshop - getting hands into the cob to mix it up (especially the kids got into this!), and of course, sampling hot bread from the oven!

A couple cob tips, based on our experience (and we are still learning every time we use the oven, even now 3 years later!):
1) Make a long hot fire for bread baking - at least 2 hours of hot fire yields about 1 hour of hot bread baking temperatures
2) Soak your oven door in water before using it for bread baking (so it doesn't catch on fire from the heat of the oven, and so it adds steam to the bread baking process)
3) Start baking bread at hotter temperatures than you normally would in your indoor oven (about 550-600F is a good starting point, as the oven will cool down during the baking process)
4) Use good organic hard bread flour if possible, especially if you are doing free-form loaves that need to hold their shape
5) The more liquid your dough, the bigger the crumb of the bread - but to hold shape of the loaf more, and allow more rise in the oven, add more flour (but don't add too much flour so bread becomes too dry - this is again something to be learned more by "feel" and practice, than by reading books!)
6) There are various ways to get a sourdough culture started:
a) catching wild yeast, just by letting flour & water sit out at room temperature
b) adding a wee bit of domesticated yeast for a boost (called "cultured sourdough")
c) add a grape, a plum or pineapple juice to your flour & water mixture (again to attract yeast)
d) some live culture plain yogurt plus a little apple cider vinegar
7) Sourdough starter can keep almost indefinitely (generations!) if maintained by feeding weekly with more flour and water
8) Health benefits of sourdough bread include more easily digestable gluten in bread, and the live culture lacto bacilli which are great for our digestive systems

Great cob links:
www.mudgirls.ca
www.cobcottage.com
build your own $20 cob oven