Cooking with Kefir and a Chocolate Mousse Tart

My latest fermentation project, following in the footsteps of sauerkraut and bread starter, has been to culture kefir. To maintain this culture, you simply transfer a tablespoon of kefir to a fresh cup of milk and let it sit on your kitchen counter for about 24 hours. The result is a tart, thickened milk that I've started deploying in all sorts of guises. 

Using regular pint Mason jars for the culturing lends itself to preparing smoothies with my favorite trick of screwing the blender blade directly onto the jar. If you like, you can make yourself a daily smoothie after passaging a tablespoon of kefir for the next batch.

I've been preparing smoothies with about a cup of kefir, a half banana, and a teaspoon each of honey and chia seeds, which make a perfect midmorning snack.

I also found that adding a spoonful of kefir resulted in an extremely exuberant bread starter crumpet batter (reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn's waffle batter from Woman of the Year) and deliciously spongey crumpets.

For ~1 cup of old bread starter (~250 grams), add 1 teaspoon sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1 tablespoon kefir. Mix well and then add 1/2 teaspoon baking soda and pour into well-oiled crumpet rings on a hot, well-oiled skillet to cook.

A final, recent use for my kefir was to add a bit of tartness to a chocolate mousse tart. Truth be told, this tart, for my son's birthday, was entirely motivated by my desire to use up a rye flour pie crust I had prepared for Thanksgiving and then accidentally left behind in the freezer when we dashed to the coast. Rye and chocolate is a classic combination, and filling a pie crust with chocolate mousse seemed like an easy way to please a newly minted eight year old.

I started with this recipe, and then, inspired by the success of using creme fraiche in chocolate fondue, I whipped in some kefir with the heavy cream (I've also used my kefir to culture heavy cream into creme fraiche, which works very well, but in this instance, I didn't have time). The resulting tart was a big success with the beaming birthday boy. 

Chocolate Mousse Tart with a Rye Crust

pie crust (based on Heidi Swanson's recipe)

1/3 cup (38 g) rye flour (I used rye flour from Lonesome Whistle Farm)

3/4 cup (88 g) unbleached all purpose white flour

1/8 tsp salt

4 Tbsp butter (1 stick), cut into 1/2 inch cubes

~1/6 cup ice water

Combine the flour and salt in a food processor and mix. Pulse in the butter cubes until they are lima bean sized. Then add enough water for the dough to just come together when you press it between your fingers. Mold into a disc, wrap with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. Roll out into a 12 inch disc, drape into a buttered tart pan, flute the edges and patch where you need to, and now chill again for at least 30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Cover the crust with aluminum foil and use rice or beans as pie weights. Bake for 10 minutes, then allow to cook completely before you fill the crust.

chocolate mousse

12 ounces bittersweet chocolate

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 3/4 cup heavy cream

1/4 kefir (or creme fraiche)

1/4 cup sugar

1. Pulse the chocolate, vanilla and salt in a food processor until the chocolate is in small pieces. Bring 1 cup cream to a boil in a heavy small saucepan. With the processor running, gradually pour the hot cream through the feed tube and process until the chocolate is melted and smooth. Transfer to a large bowl and allow to cool to room temperature.

2. Beat remaining 1 3/4 cups of of cream, 1/4 cup kefir, and 1/4 cup sugar in large bowl to stiff peaks. Fold the whipped cream into the chocolate mixture. Pour the mousse into prepared crust. Chill until set, about 6 hours. 

Fermented Green Bean Pickles

This Sunday at at the Fairmount Neighborhood Farmers Market, you can look forward to a selection of pastured chicken, lamb, and pork cuts from Fair Valley Farm and beautiful fresh cut flower bouquets from Tiger Lily Art Company. Good Food Easy at Sweetwater Farm will have the following offerings:  

Fresh
lots of corn (make savory corn pudding)
watermelon, cantaloupes, peaches, and Italian prune plums (nice waffle toppings)
Gravenstein apples, Asian pears and bartlett pears from SLO farm (put on pizza)
lots of tomatoes, including cherries and flats of romas (restock your sauce supply)
sweet and hot peppers of all kinds (use in bean pickles)
green and yellow beans (make bean pickles)
eggplants and broccoli (try these grilled eggplant dips)
fennel, cucumbers, and tomatillos (make pan roasted tomatillo salsa) 
potatoes, baby beets, kohlrabi, carrots, and daikon radish (make banh mi)
crookneck squash, summer squash, and zucchini (bake a gratin)
cabbage (green, red, savoy) (great in slow cooker soup)
radicchio, chard, kale, lettuce, including bagged mix (make kale Salade Lyonnaise)
garlic and fresh herbs (basil, oregano, sage, thyme) and home-grown lemon grass

Preserves, Beans, and Grains
From Sweet Creek Foods:
Dill Pickles, Chili Dill Pickles, Bread 'N Butter Pickles, Pickle Relish
Blueberry, Strawberry, Blackberry, and Raspberry Fruit Spreads
Enchilada Sauce and Salsa
From SLO Farm: Applesauce
Assorted beans and grains from Camas Country Mill

Having experimented with fermenting cabbage, wheat, and cream, I thought I'd try my hand at some fermented green bean pickles. I followed the general guidelines for fermented yard-long beans from Liana Krissoff's Canning for a New Generation, but added some of Sweetwater Farm's cherry bomb peppers, garlic, and chives for flavoring.  

Just as with these other ferments, I was amazed at how easily I could harness the Lactobacillus workhorses of the microbial world. Within a week of resting on my counter, quietly bubbling away, my beans had transformed into tart and sour pickles, infused with spiciness and the sharp flavors of garlic and chives, the perfect accompaniment for a corn, summer squash and millet succotash, a green salad, and my latest loaf of sourdough bread.

Fermented Green Bean Pickles

adapted from Canning for a New Generation, makes one quart

8 ounces green beans
6 cloves garlic
2 or 3 spicy peppers, such as cherry bombs
12 chives
1/4 cup pure kosher salt
8 cups water

Wipe off the beans, trim the stem ends, and cut into 1 inch lengths. Peel and coarsely chop the garlic. Stem, seed, and chop the peppers. Chop the chives into 1 inch lengths. Place all the ingredients into a clean quart-sized mason jar, preferably wide mouthed. Combine the salt and water in a large pitcher and stir until the salt is dissolved. Pour the brine over the beans in the mason jar, and place the jar in a bowl. Pour the remaining brine into a gallon-sized resealable bag, seal, and place the bag on top of the beans in the jar such that the bag covers the jar mouth and submerges the beans into their brine. Cover the container with a clean towel and let the beans ferment at room temperature. After a couple of days, you should see the fermentation process happening as small bubbles form along the beans. Skim off any scum that forms on the surface. Taste the beans and continue fermenting until they are the desired sourness, about one week. Seal and refrigerate in the brine for several weeks, or drain and freeze in freezer bags for up to 6 months.

Strawberries and Chocolate Fondue with Homemade Creme Fraiche

This Sunday at at the Fairmount Neighborhood Farmers Market, you can look forward to a selection of pastured chicken and grass-fed lamb cuts from Fair Valley Farm and beautiful fresh cut flower bouquets from Tiger Lily Art Company. Good Food Easy at Sweetwater Farm will have the following offerings: 

Fresh
Strawberries, available by the flat for $32 (dip in chocolate fondue)
Leeks, scallions, baby stalks of garlic and garlic whistles, also called scapes (try in pesto)
Anaheim and poblano chile peppers and some early tomatoes (try this fresh pasta dish)
Artichokes, baby beets, and kohlrabi (try this carrot and kohlrabi salad with harissa)
New potatoes, cauliflower and broccoli (roasted cauliflower is delicious)
Carrots, summer squash, and cucumbers
Chard, collard greens, and kale (use those stems for pickles)
Fresh herbs (basil, oregano, sage, thyme) plus home-grown lemon grass!!
Lettuce, including ready-to-eat bagged mix
Cherries & Blenheim apricots (from Washington)

Preserves
From Sweet Creek Foods:
Dill Pickles, Chili Dill Pickles, Bread 'N Butter Pickles, Pickle Relish
Blueberry, Strawberry, Blackberry, & Raspberry Fruit Spreads
Enchilada Sauce and Salsa
From SLO Farm: Applesauce

Bean and Grains
Sweetwater Farm's polenta and cornmeal!
Assorted beans and grains from Camas Country Mill

This will likely be the last week of a spectacular strawberry season. Do not let the opportunity pass to indulge in some chocolate dipped strawberries. For a recent birthday celebration I wanted to make this ultimate chocolate fondue recipe, but it required creme fraiche, and rather than making yet another trip to the store, I tried my hand at making my own. 

The amazing activities of microbes never cease to inspire me, and now that I have witnessed how easily a spoonful of buttermilk bacteria can transform a jar of liquid cream into a lovely, tangy custard, I'm kicking myself for not having made creme fraiche every week of my adult life.

The tanginess of the creme fraiche made for the best chocolate fondue I've ever had. And just as the lactobacilli devoured the carbohydrates in the cream, so the pack of eleven year old girls devoured the strawberries and fondue with gusto.

Chocolate Fondue

adapted from Scharffen Berger

makes 2 cups, serves 8 to 12

6 ounces dark chocolate chips (60% or more cacao)
1/2 cup creme fraiche (recipe below)
3 Tbsp butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
Strawberries and other fruits, small pieces of cake and butter cookies (for dipping)

In a small fondue pot, combine the chocolate, crème frâiche, butter and extract. Place over the fondue burner using either a votive candle or low sterno heat and allow the chocolate to melt. Stir until fondue is smooth.

To serve, keep warm while guests dip fruit, cookies, or pieces of cake in the fondue.

Your chocolate fondue keeps up to a week in the refrigerator. Reheat over very low heat before serving.

Homemade Creme Fraiche (from food52)

makes 1/2 cup

1/2 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoons buttermilk

Seek out a good quality heavy cream that is pasteurized, not ultra-pasteurized. If you can only find ultra-pasteurzed, it will work, but will take longer to thicken. To start, pour 1/2 cup of heavy cream into a non-reactionary container such as a glass Mason jar. Next, add one tablespoon of buttermilk to the heavy cream. Cover the jar with a lid and shake until everything is thoroughly combined. Loosely cover the heavy cream mixture with a tea towel or moist paper towel and allow it to sit out on your kitchen counter for 12-24 hours. Ideally the temperature in your kitchen will be from 72 to 78 degrees. Mine took a full 24 hours to thicken. After it's at the preferred consistency, transfer it to your fridge. The creme fraiche will be good for up to 2 weeks.

Bread Starter Naan

The Bread 101 class I have been co-teaching all term finished up today with a plethora of home baked breads (this Chad Robertson recipe) from the starters that the students have nurtured all term. It was impressive to see the quality of bread produced and to hear about the students' resourcefulness in creating these loaves. A common theme was the challenge of fitting the demands of bread baking into a busy weekend preparing for final exams. Over the weekend, I experimented with using my starter to make naan, which proved to be a successful vehicle for sour, fermented flavors and a speedy enough bread to be able to mix the night before and serve for lunch the next day.

I started with a naan recipe from Neelam Batra and incorporated a portion of my sourdough starter, as well as a small amount of commercial yeast. The dough already contains yogurt (I used Nancy's with live cultures), which gives it a fermented sourness, so the grain-fermenting wild yeast and bacteria of my starter seemed right at home in the mix.  

A dough I started in the evening with an active culture (fed that morning) doubled in bulk overnight. A half hour before noon, I preheated my oven to 500 degrees with a cast iron griddle positioned below the heating element. Rolled out flats of dough placed on this hot griddle puffed up in a matter of minutes, and were eaten hot out of the oven, slathered with melted butter. In the meantime, my students were still busy building the gluten networks of their country loaves. The final results were well worth all the hours of work, but this naan is a good alternative when time is short.

Bread Starter Naan

adapted from Neelam Batra's 1000 Indian Recipes 

makes 8 to 10 naan

1/3 cup active starter (90 g)
1/8 tsp yeast
1 tsp sugar
1/4 cup water (or yogurt whey)
1/2 cup yogurt (125 g)
2 cups flour (250 g) (I used 1 cup unbleached white and 1 cup red fife)
2 Tbsp vegetable oil (I used canola)
1/4 tsp salt or to taste (I used ~3/8 tsp)
more flour for dusting
melted butter or ghee for brushing on the cooked naan

1. Start with an actively growing culture that you've fed no more than 12 hours earlier. Mix together the starter, yeast, sugar, water, yogurt, oil, and flour until just incorporated. Allow to sit for half an hour (autolysis period). Then add the salt and kneed the dough until it is soft and elastic. Cover the dough in a clean bowl and let it rise for at least 6 hours to overnight, until it has doubled in size. 

2. Heat the oven to 500 degrees and place a cast iron skillet directly under the heating element. Divide the dough into 8 to 10 portions and roll into flat ovals about 6 inches in length. Place the dough flats onto the skillet and bake for about two minutes until they puff up. Flip and bake for another minute on the second side, until they are slightly browned. Remove from the oven and brush with melted butter as the next batch bakes. Eat warm.

Notes: there are a lot of ways to modulate the sourness of the final bread. For less sour naan, do one or more of the following: use a more recently fed culture, double the amount of commercial yeast, double the amount of sugar, use water instead of whey for the liquid, decrease the dough fermentation time.

Bread Starter Crumpets

Bakers refer to their bread starters as their "mother", but I must admit to harboring maternal feelings towards mine. For the past few weeks, I've fed it when it's hungry, kept it warm, and celebrated its accomplishments. One of the greatest challenges has been to deal with its excessive productively, just like the endless onslaught of artwork that returns in my children's backpacks each day. Sourdough waffles could help, but I needed the moral equivalent of a magical 12 quart minestrone recipe made from macaroni and dried bean collages. 

This crumpet recipe from Chocolate and Zucchini, adapted from King Arthur Flour, is essentially straight fried bread starter. The first time I tried it, my starter was a bit too thick and the baking soda didn't get mixed in well. For my next batch, in a small stroke of frugal kitchen genius, I added some yogurt whey that I had strained out to make a thickened yogurt sauce, which gave it the right consistency and added to the tangy flavor.

Why would someone happen to own crumpet rings, you might ask. Mine were a birthday gift that I received from my future husband shortly after we started dating. Special occasions can be awkward early in a relationship, but he handled the situation charmingly, preparing me a lovely dinner followed by a scavenger hunt for my gift, complete with rhyming clues. At the last clue, I realized with a sudden shock that the gift was going to be a ring, and just as quickly I realized what my answer would be if it were an engagement ring. When I opened the gift, I was overcome with happy relief at knowing I'd met the man I wanted to marry, mischievous scavenger hunts and all, and also knowing that we were only at the crumpet ring stage. Now sixteen years later, we have two children who can help make crumpets for Mother's Day tea.

Bread Starter Crumpets

from Chocolate and Zucchini, adapted from King Arthur Flour

Yields eight 9-cm (3 1/2-inch) crumpets.*

270 grams (1 cup) bread starter (can use older starter that has been kept in the fridge for a few weeks
)
a little yogurt whey or buttermilk for thinning, if necessary
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon sea salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda
butter or vegetable oil for greasing

1. Place the starter in a large bowl. Add the sugar and salt, and whisk to combine. The batter should be the consistency of a very thick pancake batter and pourable. If necessary, thin the batter a little with some yogurt whey or buttermilk.

2. Heat a skillet over medium low heat. Grease the crumpet rings well. When the griddle is hot, melt a pad of butter  or pour on a little vegetable oil and spread it around with a spatula. 

3. Just before you are ready to cook the batter, whisk in the baking soda. As the baking soda reacts with the acid in the starter, the batter will foam and rise. Using a measuring cup or a small ladle, pour about 1/4 cup of the batter into each crumpet ring.

4. Cook for a few minutes, until the top is set and the bottoms are lightly browned when you peek underneath by lifting with a spatula. As they cook, the crumpets will gradually shrink back from the rings. Use pliers or tongs to lift the crumpet rings off the crumpets (you may need to run a knife around the edge to help them loose), and flip the crumpets to brown lightly on the other side.

5. Eat the crumpets warm off the griddle or cool them for toasting later. They can also be frozen once cooled. Wipe down the crumpet rings if necessary, re-grease, and place them on the skillet to preheat again before repeating with the remaining batter.

*Note: Clotilde Dusoulier recommends that if you have multiple cups of starter to use up, you should mix the batter in batches with 1 cup of starter at a time, so that the crumpets are cooked shortly after the addition of the baking soda.

Bread Experimentation

For our Bread 101 class, the five instructors conducted a grand experiment in bread making, with decidedly mixed, but edifying results. 

Each of us has also been experimenting on our own, with more success. Two weekends ago I tried a natural starter bread from Clotilde Dusoulier, author of the blog Chocolate and Zucchini. Dusoulier follows a 1:2:3 ratio of starter: water: flour, which produces a very moist, but manageable dough. For baking, the shaped loaf is placed into a cold Dutch oven, where it finishes proofing as the oven heats. Following this recipe, and using a 50/50 mixture of Red Fife and white flour, I produced a lovely round loaf with a crisp crust. However, in a flu-addled fever, I omitted the salt, which produced a rather tasteless bread (lesson learned: don't bake when under the influence of viruses).

Last weekend I followed the instructions from Bread Lab baker Jonathan McDowell. This time I used all whole grain flour (80% Red Fife and 20% mixture of soft white wheat and buckwheat), and I remembered the salt. This dough is much wetter (87% hydration versus Dusoulier's 67%), which makes it challenging to handle. The hardest step for me was inverting the shaped loaf from my proofing "basket" into a piping hot Dutch oven without deflating it. The final bread had a delicious flavor and lovely crumb, but was decidedly flat. For a beginning bread baker like myself, I would recommend starting with Dusoulier's recipe, but McDowell's offers a great next challenge. Both will produce bread that is well worth the effort of nurturing a bread starter for days on end.

Seeded Emmer Pan Loaf

While the rest of the world may be striving to recreate Chad Robertson's cult status country bread, the breads that caught my attention when I first read through his Tartine Book No. 3 were his dense pan loaves, resembling my favorite German Volkornbrot. I adapted his toasted barley loaf recipe to my pantry supplies from Lonesome Whistle Farm and Camas Country Mill, using cooked emmer (instead of barley), flax seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, and Red Fife wheat flour instead of spelt and einkorn.  

Packed full with all this particulate matter, the dough felt like wet concrete, as the recipe describes. And although never destined to rise above the rims of the baking pan, it achieved the lofty goal of living up to my German bread memories. My starter and I will be moving on to attempt some airier levain breads, inspired by a recent visit from wheat breeder Stephen Jones, who runs what the New York Times describes as "a Wonka-esque wonderland for crusty, airy-crumbed experimentation," but I know I'll be returning to this seeded pan loaf recipe again for its dense delivery of flavor.

Seeded Emmer Pan Loaf

adapted from the Toasted Barley Loaf from Tartine Book No. 3

200 g emmer berries cooked in 400 g cold water
250 g Red Fife or other high protein whole grain flour
157 g buttermilk
10 g dark malt syrup
238 g water
155 g leaven (well fed bread starter, described here)
8 g fine sea salt
102 g flax seeds
52 g sesame seeds
45 g sunflower seeds

1. Two days before you will bake the bread, give your stater an extra feeding halfway through its 24 hour cycle to make it extra active. Also go ahead and cook your emmer berries, simmering and covered, for about 40 minutes, until they have absorbed all the liquid. If you like, you could toast the emmer berries on a baking sheet at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes before cooking. Cool completely before using.

2. Start the dough the morning of the day before you will bake the bread. In a large bowl, combine the leaven with the buttermilk, malt syrup, and water, and mix by hand to incorporate.  Add the flour and mix by hand until thoroughly combined, about 5 minutes. Let the dough rest, covered, in the bowl for 30 minutes (this is the autolysis step). Add the salt, cooked emmer, and seeds and continue mixing by hand until incorporated. The dough should have the feel of wet concrete. 

3. Cover the bowl with a clean kitchen fowl and let rise at warm room temperature for about 3 hours (this is the first proofing). Every 45 minutes or so, fold the dough to strengthen the gluten network, either with your hands as shown here, or if you are less ambitious, with a scraper as shown here.

4. Butter a loaf pan very well. Scoop the dough into the pan and smooth the top with wet hands. Let the dough rise in the pan, uncovered, at a warm room temperature. Cover the pan with a clean, dry kitchen towel and let rise overnight in the refrigerator (this is the second proofing). 

5. The next day, preheat the oven to 425 degrees C. Use a pair of scissors to make shallow cuts in the top of the loaf to score and brush with water. Bake for about 1 hour and 20 minutes or until the internal temperature has reached 210 degrees F. Let the loaf cool on a wire rack for at least half a day before cutting. The bread keeps well for up to one week properly wrapped.

Baking Brioche and Cheater Bostock

Last weekend, in my continued adventures with baking with a bread starter, I attempted a recipe from Chad Robertson's Tartine Book No. 3 for golden brioche. "This is a very forgiving dough" he promises. But not simple. It calls for three forms of yeast: the starter or leaven, an overnight poolish (a sponge inoculated with a small amount of instant yeast), and some instant yeast added at the time of mixing. It also calls for flour from kamult, an ancient grain that is a relative of durum wheat; I substituted in Red Fife. Most importantly, it calls for an ingredient almost impossible to procure in our modern world: uninterrupted time. I tried to attend to my dough's various needs for risings, turnings, and shaping, but it was given short shrift to dance lessons, karate birthday parties, and soccer games. By the end of a long day, the dough had not reached its growth milestones, but I needed to stick it in the oven, just as I needed to send over-exhausted and sugar-ramped children to bed despite the unlikelihood of their falling asleep. Bread baking, I decided, is not unlike parenting and one can only do one's best.

The resulting bread was decided more squat than the lofty brioche loaves pictured in Robertson's book, but it had a beautiful crumb and delicious flavor. I was excited to try it in the recipe on the next page for Bostock, which Robertson explains is simply "twice-baked brioche." It looked easy enough when I scanned the recipe (making a mental note not to trim the crusts as instructed, because discarding even a millimeter of my hard labor would be too painful). But when I began to assemble the ingredients, my heart sank. Not only would I need to make an orange syrup, to be layered underneath marmalade and sliced almonds, but I'd failed to notice the additional ingredient of "Pistachio Frangipane (page 325)." Leaven and polish had been asking a lot, but this was the last straw. Instead, I simply slathered a brioche slice with apricot marmalade, sprinkled on some sliced almonds, and stuck it in the toaster oven. It was scrumptious. And so, below I give you the recipe for Cheater Bostock, made with brioche that you can bake or procure by whatever means possible, because unlimited time is even harder to source than ancient grains.

Cheater Bostock

slices of brioche
orange marmalade or apricot jam
sliced almonds

Slather your brioche with orange marmalade or apricot jam, sprinkle with sliced almonds, and toast in a toaster oven until the almonds are golden and fragrant. Enjoy and savor your free time.

Bread Starter Waffles

Like a microbial cultural anthropologist, I've continued to try to study the habits of my bread starter. And like my co-instructors, I've been wondering what to do with all the leftover starter generated by a regular regimen of diluting my culture into fresh flour paste. Great minds think alike and so, like them, I resorted to breakfast fare; in their cases pancakes of one kind and another, in my case waffles. I started with a sourdough waffles recipe from King Arthur Flour, which I melded with these yeasted buckwheat waffles from Deborah Madison. The dough made with the starter had significantly more integrity than those I had made with an overnight sponge from commercial yeast, and the waffles had a more complex, tangy taste that paired nicely with tart, stewed rhubarb and fresh strawberries. I'm thinking that it might work well to keep my culture growing slowly in the refrigerator during the week and revive it on the weekends for bouts of bread baking and breakfasts. The microbes in my culture are likely studying me as well and learning to understand the habits of their human cohabitants who dash out of the house five mornings a week and lounge around the other two.

Bread Starter Buckwheat Waffles

(makes about 6 waffles in a Belgian waffle iron)

overnight sponge
1 cup sourdough starter, unfed
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1 cup buckwheat flour
1 tablespoon honey
2 cups buttermilk

waffle or pancake batter
all of the overnight sponge
2 large eggs
1/4 cup vegetable oil or melted butter
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda

1. To make the overnight sponge, stir down your refrigerated starter, and remove 1 cup. In a large mixing bowl, stir together the 1 cup starter, flour, honey, and buttermilk. Cover and let rest at room temperature overnight.

2. The next morning, finish the bater. In a small bowl or mixing cup, beat together the eggs, and oil or butter. Add to the overnight sponge. Add the salt and baking soda, stirring to combine. The batter will bubble.

3. Pour batter onto your preheated, greased waffle iron, and bake according to the manufacturer's instructions.

Serving suggestion: a dollop of plain yogurt, a drizzle of stewed rhubarb, fresh strawberries, and maple syrup.

Bread Starter

Teaching is the best way to learn, and this term I have the great pleasure of teaching a class on the science of bread, which I hope will make me more knowledgeable not only about the theory but also the practice of bread making. This breakfast spread of fresh breads at a recent conference in Germany offered further inspiration for bread baking.

And so, along with my students, I have been tackling the challenge of cultivating and nurturing a bread starter, following the detailed instructions from Chad Robertson’s new book on whole grain baking, Tartine Book 3.

The process involves a certain degree of precision (flour and water doled out in grams) and a great deal of chance, as one hopes for wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria to alight in one’s bowl and set up shop fermenting the complex polysaccharides of the grains. 

Magically my flour paste started to produce bubbles after a day (can one fault the proponents of spontaneous generation?)

Rather than leave it all to chance, I took my starter out for a bit of wild yeast hunting at Noisette Pastry Kitchen. I can't be sure whether this inoculation helped along the starter, but over a matter of days, I had an actively bubbling culture with a somewhat pleasant yogurt smell. 

How is it it that time and again, when people offer up a flour paste to the air, they are able to produce a leavening for bread? What we consider as the generous efforts of yeast and lactic acid bacteria to aerate our bread and fill it with delicious flavors, is, from a microbial perspective, quite antisocial behavior. The yeast strains that humans have selected over our history for their utility in bread, wine, and beer making, are unusual among microbes in their metabolic choices. When confronted with an abundance of simple sugars and plenty of oxygen with which to burn this fuel through aerobic respiration, Saccharomyces cerevisiae instead chooses to gobble these up in the sloppy and wasteful process of fermentation. Their voracious devouring of resources, spewing fermentation products in the process, inhibits the growth of other microbes who are outcompeted and repulsed by the yeasts' greedy and sloppy eating habits. Only the like-minded lactic acid producing bacteria will set up shop with the yeast, using a similar wasteful fermentation strategy once oxygen is depleted from the environment. And thus bread starters, although possessing individual nuanced flavors, are remarkably similar in their composition of microbial boors, who can produce the most refined breads.

Stay tuned for experiments with baking with this starter. And you can read more about my co-teachers' adventures with starters here and here.

Sundry Uses for Homemade Sauerkraut

After attending the standing room only sauerkraut class by John Karlik from Sweetwater Farm, packed with eager hipsters taking copious notes, I recently tried my hand at sauerkraut making. At his demonstration, John had an impressive handmade mandolin about the size of a fruit crate that easily shredded a dozen cabbages in a matter of minutes, which got pounded down in a large tub by a couple of enthusiastic aughts using a large wooden paddle resembling a cricket bat. I started smaller scale with a single head of cabbage, a kitchen knife, and a five year old wielding a meat tenderizer. It worked.

After about twenty-four hours, the pounded, salted cabbage released enough of its own liquid to become submerged underneath the weight of a clean plate and gallon bag of water, allowing the inoculum of cabbage-associated Lactobacilli bacteria to flourish in the salty, oxygen-depleted brine and get busy fermenting. The recipe I followed from Karlik is essentially the same as this detailed one from Sandor Katz. The one difference is that rather than checking on it every couple of days, I left my crock rather neglected in the basement for about six weeks. When I finally remembered to take a peek, it had developed a skim of mold (Karlik had explained that he has a dedicated shop-vac for this), but once that was scraped off, the underlying kraut was delicious. One large cabbage produced two quarts. 

"What are those hipsters going to do with all that sauerkraut?" my sister wondered after I told her about Karlik's demo. I can highly recommend Karlik's vegetarian reuben sandwich with kraut piled on melted cheese and a generous slather of mustard. A less conventional use presented itself when it occurred to me that red cabbage sauerkraut is packed with pigments and lightly acidified: perfect for dying Easter eggs. 

Vegetarian Reuben with Homemade Sauerkraut

2 slices of sandwich bread 
several slices of sharp cheddar or swiss cheese 
homemade sauerkraut (follow this recipe from Sandor Katz)
dijon mustard

In a toaster oven or skillet, toast the bread lightly. Then layer on the cheese on one slice and continue toasting until the cheese is melted. Slather mustard on the other slice, heap on some sauerkraut, slap the two slices together, and enjoy.

Dyeing Easter eggs

For a lovely mottled blue pattern, submerge hard boiled white eggs in some red cabbage sauerkraut and wait a couple of hours. For a more even blue color, decant some sauerkraut juice into a small bowl and submerge your eggs in this. If you don't have red sauerkraut on hand, you can boil some red cabbage leaves in water and put in a splash of vinegar. Other natural dyes can be made with turmeric (yellow) and beets (pink).