Our Daily Bread

We talk a lot of simple pleasures in life.  One of those simple pleasures for us is a loaf of homemade sourdough bread.  Tricia keeps a batch of sourdough starter going at all times as she bakes a loaf of bread each week.  I can't remember when we last bought a loaf of bread from the grocery store.  The wholegrain bread we make is from a mixture of spelt and kamut wheat. 

The sourdough starter smells so good.  Oftentimes I'll walk in the kitchen and Tricia is popping the top off the starter to smell the fermentation going on.  She was getting everything ready last night to make a fresh loaf, so I thought I'd grab my camera and document the process.  Here she's poured some of the wheat flour into the mixing bowl and added the starter.

The dough hook attachment on the mixer works the dough and gets it all kneaded and ready.

For the last ten minutes, the dough is taken out of the mixer.  Tricia kneads it, folds it, presses it and works it really hard.

Then she works it some more.  The bread changes form with the kneading, getting more elasticity.

We like to bake in stoneware loaf pans.  The stoneware is brushed down with coconut oil so the bread will pop out with ease after cooking.  Then we place the dough in the stoneware.

We cover it with a dishrag and will allow it to proof overnight.  In the winter time, when the house is cooler, we'll proof it in the warmer of the oven.

We began proofing at 10 pm.  Then here we are the next morning at 6 am.  Look at the difference of the photo above with the one below.  You can judge how much it has risen by looking at the distance between the rag and the bottom of the light plug receptacle in each.

The bread is put into the oven.  We call it Lovin' in the oven.  In just a skinny minute or two, the aroma of freshly baking bread fills the home with an irresistible fragrance.

“Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.” – James Beard

James Beard is right!  It is vitally important to cut a slice off while the bread is fresh from the oven, warm and soft.  I will fight you for the heel!  Spread some good homemade butter on the warm slice and it'll take your breath away.  That's some of the last butter from our cows for a while since we dried the cows off.

Give us this day, our daily bread...

Flour Power

Years back, we purchased a grain mill.  We poured wheat berries in and cranked and cranked until we had flour for bread-making.  We purchased our wheat berries from Azure Standard Co-op that came in 25 lb. bags.  We generally buy two types of wheat - Kamut and Spelt.  Here, I have a few grains of Spelt in my hand.

The grain mill has a hopper on top that we pour the wheat berries in.  In just a bit, they'll be turned into flour.

The flour comes out of the mill and fills a container that we put underneath it.  As I look at the photo below, there's a lot of activity going on in the background other than flour being made.  You can see onions on a drying rack that are curing in the kitchen as it is too hot and humid outside.  There are also tomatoes on a tray under a paper bag that are ripening inside, away from the stink bugs.

For years, we used 'elbow grease' to grind the wheat berries into flour.  The grain mill had a crank on it.  We could grind a cup of flour in exactly 3 minutes.  It wasn't a bad job.  Because of the novelty of it, we'd leave it loaded on the counter.  When we'd have guests, it always caught their eye.  They'd walk over to it and start cranking.  It was new for them and a challenge and fun, so our guests ended making a lot of flour for us.  Ha ha.  

After a few years, we purchased a small electric motor attachment that fits on it once you remove the crank.  Now, you plug it in and electricity does the job for you.  I guess we're getting soft and lazy!  Never fear, if the electricity ever goes out, we will put the crank back on the grain mill.

The flour has all the bran and germ on it.  It's healthy for you - not white, refined, and processed.

It makes GREAT bread and other things we love to eat.  For example, just this weekend, we had some extra cream.  Tricia made some butter and so she had some buttermilk.  She made homemade buttermilk pancakes made with the spelt flour with pecans in them.

Our grain mill has had many pounds of wheat berries and corn run through it.  One problem we're finding now, however, is that the wheat berries are getting harder to get your hands on.  They've been out at our co-op.  We've heard that wheat berries that are available are very pricey!  We're living in interesting times, for sure.

Oh, by the way, Happy Father's Day, all you Dads out there!

Your Nose to the Grindstone

Opening up the back door of your home to the smell of fresh baked bread is one of those simple pleasures of life that will put a big grin on your face.  It is soothing, relaxing, and invokes an involuntary reflex that directs you to immediately rush to where the bread knife and butter are located.  Not margarine.  Butter.  Real Butter.

Image Credit

If you want to do it right, there's some work, though, before you find yourself liberally spreading real butter on top of a fresh, warm piece of bread that you've just sliced from a fresh baked loaf.  And if you really want to do it right, then it involves a little more work, but it's worth it.  Let's check it out.

First, I want to talk about an excellent documentary we watched on PBS the other night.  You can watch it online by clicking Here.  You can also read the entire transcript by clicking HERE.  It is called In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan.  We enjoyed it immensely.  In the documentary he said that the bread that our ancestors ate was much different from the white bread we eat.  It was whole grain.  The flour was made by grinding wheat between stones. The resulting flour contained the whole grain - the bran, the germ.  There was a downside to this, though - the bread was heavy and chewy.  White bread, made by removing the bran and germ made a lighter bread, but only the rich could afford it.  White bread also had a long shelf life as the germ, which was removed, is the part that goes bad quickly.

Then a new technology called the roller mill came out where you could easily separate the bran and the germ and feed that stuff to the cattle.  Except "that stuff" is the good stuff.  The stuff that makes you healthy.  The bran and germ are loaded with nutrients and vitamins.  The white flour is mainly carbohydrates that the body breaks down into sugars.  We love that, but eating white bread is horrible for you, as most of the nutrients and vitamins were robbed.

Once people began eating mostly white bread, it began to take its toll on people's health.  They began to get sick and suffer from diseases that were heretofore rare. Then it was discovered that these sickly people had a nutrient deficiency caused by removing the 'good stuff' out of the bread!  Well, what do you think the food industry did?  Yep, they began enriching flour with the very nutrients and vitamins that were removed.  Crazy, isn't it?  They began trying to solve the problem that their high tech solution caused by using more high tech solutions.

So, back to the daily grind for our daily bread.  We're low tech rednecks.  We have sought to make white bread extinct in our home.  Here's how we do it:  First, five or so years ago we purchased a Victorio Hand Operated Grain Mill.  We're actually on our second one as we wore the first one out. We like this appliance!  We purchase wheat berries in bulk in 25 pound sacks from Azure Standard Co-op and use two different types of wheat:

• Spelt: an ancient grain mentioned in the Bible.  It is a soft wheat and easy to grind.
• Kamut: also an ancient grain.  It is a hard wheat and harder to grind, but has a nice, nutty flavor and more protein.

Tricia normally mixes 1/2 spelt flour with 1/2 kamut flour to make homemade bread.

Grinding the daily bread

We always keep the hopper full of wheat berries and it beckons you to crank and make flour as you stroll through the kitchen.  We've found out (plagiarizing from Tom Sawyer) that if you keep it full, when guests and neighbor kids come to visit, their curiosity is piqued and they'll grind some of the flour for us.  That is shameful conduct on our part, is it not?!

Give it a spin!

Here is an up close look at Spelt grains.  You can see that it has the bran (all nutrients) remaining.

Spelt

For those (like me) that like immediate gratification, you can see the results of your labors coming out of the bottom of the grain mill as you crank.  It builds in big mounds and every so often you have to shake down the cone.

Flour Power!

We have separate storage containers for our spelt flour and our kamut flour since we use each for different baking purposes.  When we fill up the container, we'll dump it into the bulk storage container.

Whole wheat flour

You're probably thinking, "Doesn't that take a long time?"  Not really.  You'd be surprised.  Last night I timed myself.  At a leisurely pace I started cranking and turned off the timer when I had one heaping cup of ground spelt flour.  It only took me 1 minute and 22 seconds to grind a cup of flour! Of course, as fatigue sets in, your second cup will take a little longer, but when you get tired, you enlist help!  It really doesn't take much time at all.  And, with all the calories you burned cranking your wheat into flour, you can well afford to eat a couple more slices of fresh, warm bread when it comes out of the oven and slather butter on top that quickly melts into the bread!!

Flour falling out of the mill

The fresh loaves don't last long around our house.  I wanted to take a nice picture of a freshly baked loaf of bread, but the loaf was already partially devoured.

Our Daily Bread

But that's okay, it'll only be a few minutes until we (or guests that come to visit) have more freshly ground flour from which to bake more loaves of bread.  Victorio actually sells an electric motor attachment that you can attach to the mill if you take the handle off, but for the time being, we're just fine grinding it with man or woman-power.

I can remember as a child reading a Little Golden Book story about "The Little Red Hen."  Do you remember that old folk tale?  It is about a hen that finds some wheat and asked all the barnyard animals to help, but no one will.  She harvests it, threshes it, mills it into flour, and bakes the flour into bread.  No one will help her. BUT, when it is time to eat, well, they all want to eat.  The little red hen declines their offers to help her eat the bread, telling them, "No one would help be prepare it, so one one should help me eat it."  The little red hen and her chicks ate it all.  The moral to the story is that if you want to share in the enjoyment of a product, you should contribute something to making it. Certainly wise words from the little red hen!

From the Beginning to the End

Part of homesteading, trying to "do-it-yourself", or even trying to eat healthier, less processed foods require learning to start from the beginning and taking it to the very end.  Here's an example.  We've always loved pesto and make container after container of the stuff, freeze it, and eat it all throughout the year.  It is delicious over pasta or eaten as a dip.  Here is the link from a previous post that shows you how to make it: How to Harvest Basil and Make Pesto.

Now you can purchase pesto from the store, or you can purchase basil to make your pesto, or you can purchase basil seeds and grow your own.  While there is nothing wrong with the former, we prefer the latter. Then you can save the basil seeds and grow basil every year thereafter.  The stuff grows quicker than weeds or our Federal Deficit.  I have a number of basil seedlings that are popping up right now in some containers. Once they put on their true leaves, I'll transplant them into the garden. The seedlings you see below are the beginning.  The end result will be pesto or seasoning for pizza, spaghetti, and other Italian dishes.

The Beginning

As the link above showed you how to harvest basil and make pesto, you still have to serve it over pasta. Prior to last year, we had always bought pasta by the box or in the bag, but we found out that making pasta is super easy.  We use spelt flour, but you can use any flour, I would assume.  All you need is 2 cups of spelt flour, 3 eggs at room temperature, a little salt, and 2 tablespoons of olive oil.  Stir all ingredients and knead until it all comes together.  Voila!  Pasta Dough!

Pasta Deaux

We don't have a fancy schmancy pasta maker.  Tricia picked this one up on clearance from a discount store. It gets the job done.  Essentially, you run the dough through the rollers to stretch it out.  Then you run it through again using a different roller to make different sized pasta.  Today, we're making regular spaghetti pasta.

We're rolling in the dough!

When you crank it through the device after removing the rollers, it cuts the pasta dough into whatever type pasta you want to make.  You'd think this might take a long time, but it doesn't.  From flour to pasta in just a few minutes.

From dough to spaghetti

Then we move it right into a pot on the stove top full of water and cook like you normally would pasta.

Homemade pasta in the pot

Add a little salt and check on it from time to time, but it won't be long until your homemade pasta is done and you can pour it into a colander to drain off the water.

It's done!

Then we grab a bowl and heap mounds of pesto on top of the freshly made pasta, which serves as a delivery mechanism for getting the pasta to your mouth.  Since our basil plants are just seedlings right now, we thawed out a container of frozen pesto from last summer and warmed it on the stove top.

Fresh pasta and pesto 

I mix it up real good to get the pesto flavors all commingled with the pasta and we thank the Good Lord for His provisions...

A nice, easy, delicious meal

And Supper's on!  From beginning to end, this is an easy, delicious meal containing mostly ingredients either grown and/or processed right here on the farm or in Tricia's kitchen. 

Grinding Spelt into Flour

Tricia orders Spelt in 25 pound sacks from Azure Standard, a co-op that we belong to and it gets delivered to our town.  Spelt is a very interesting grain.  It is an ancient form of wheat that was a staple back in the Bronze Age and medieval times.  I learned on various websites that because spelt requires less fertilizers than normal bread wheat, it has gained a resurgence since the organic movement picked up steam.

Spelt is also mentioned a couple of times in the Bible:

 "Take also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils and millet, and spelt and put them in one vessel…" Ezekiel 4:9

Isaiah 28:25-27

New King James Version (NKJV)

25 When he has leveled its surface,
Does he not sow the black cummin
And scatter the cummin,
Plant the wheat in rows,
The barley in the appointed place,
And the spelt in its place?

Pretty cool, huh?

25 lb sack of spelt

It looks very similar to normal wheat berries.

Spelt berries

It would be most difficult to make bread with spelt berries.  You must turn it into flour first.  So we got our hand-cranked grain mill and attached it to the counter top and put some spelt berries in the hopper.  Me, Benjamin, and Tricia alternated cranking the handle and filling the hopper with spelt berries.  We cranked...

First a little pile

And cranked...

Then a bigger one...

And cranked...  You know what?  Even if you aren't hungry for bread when you start milling the spelt berries into flour, by the time you're finished, you will have worked up an appetite.

In not too terribly long, we had 5 lbs of spelt flour that we poured into a bag.  We'll use it to bake bread, make pancakes, waffles and biscuits, and even make pasta with it!  

Yes, it is much easier to purchase flour at the store instead of doing all this work.  We live in a world where everything is convenient and immediate.  You can go down to the corner store and satisfy your appetite for most anything without expending much time or effort.  Not only is grinding your own flour good exercise, but it is a good reminder that honest work is a blessing and you really appreciate good, wholesome food a little more when you put in some effort to prepare it.