Eight Acres

Since I first recieved my sourdough cake starter "Herman" , I have been enjoying experimenting with using it to make cakes, pancakes and biscuits (cookies).  I can adapt just about any recipe to Herman, and he adds a slight sour tang and creates a light fluffy batter.  Here's what I do to adapt a recipe, just use all the same quantities, but combine them in a different order: Melt the butter in a pot over a low heat.  Stir in the flour, rapadura (sugar), and flavours (cocoa, ginger, spices), and add a slurp of Herman and any other liquids, put on the lid and leave the mixture at room temperature for a few hours (you can start this in the morning and bake in the afternoon, or even put it all in the fridge after a few hours and bake it later the next day, just depends on the outside temperature, in winter you could probably leave it out overnight). When you're ready to bake, add the egg and a good heaped tablespoon of baking soda (leave out the baking powder).  T...

Since I got my sourdough cake starter, I've been having fun experimenting with other uses for it.  I can be adapted to all sorts of sweet recipes, and as we don't eat a lot of cake, that is a good thing! mixing up the dry ingredients, the butter and some starter When I first received the starter it came with all these instructions about how to feed it and look after it.  This included feeding it every few days, not keeping it in the fridge, splitting it after a week and giving most of it away.  Needless to say I ignored these, otherwise I would ave no starter left!  Here's how to actually look after your starter: You can keep the starter in the fridge, in a glass jar - mine has been living there for several months. You just have to get it out every 2 weeks (or so), give it a good stir and tip out half (you can either give that half away, use it in baking or just tip it on the compost) Then top it up with a bit of flour, sugar and milk (or water),...

I have been keeping my sourdough cake starter in the fridge and every couple of weeks I take it out and either use or discard half of the starter and refresh with flour, sugar and water.  The other day I really felt like pancakes, so I thought I'd try making sourdough pancakes. I really just made up the recipe from the Edmonds cook book (so you could just use your normal pancake recipe), but left out the eggs and baking powder until right at the end, and added half my sourdough starter.  I made up the mixture in the morning and it was lovely and frothy by dinner time.  I added the egg and baking soda (instead of baking powder, as the mixture is already nicely acidic from the fermentation), and made the pancakes. I usually like very thin pancakes, but I found that these tended to break if they were too thin, so I had to make them thicker.  The pancakes had a pleasant sourness, which was lovely with a drizzle of butter and honey (as I didn't have any maple syr...

My friend gave me a bowl of sourdough cake starter, called "Herman".  A bit of a google revealed that this cake starter has been around for a long time, maybe not this particular starter mixture in my kitchen, but the idea of this cake starter has been circulating since the 1980s or earlier.  There's actually an entire website devoted to it, as well as lots of newspaper articles and forum discussions.  Have you heard of it before now?  Herman when he arrived - pictured with my Danish bread dough whisk, which was a very cool xmas pressie from a friend, and I've been using it at every opportunity In its current incarnation, the mix is given away with instructions on how to look after it for 10 days.  It needs to be "fed" with flour, sugar and water on day 4 and 10, and stirred on each of the other days.  On the 10th day the started is split into four portions, three to give away and one used to make a cake.  The recipe that comes with Herman is for a...

I came home from the sourdough and fermented food workshop and I wanted to try to make my first sourdough loaf right away, before I forgot what to do!  Why am I so keen on sourdough?  Well its the traditional method of making bread that was used before "bakers yeast" was isolated.  It can be made from only flour, water and sourdough starter, so is a very sustainable method as long as flour is available.  Because the flour is fermented for 12-24 hours before cooking, this allows the enzyme phytase to break down the phytic acid in the grain (phytic acid prevents mineral adsorption), it also allows microbes to begin to digest the nutrients so that they will be more available.  (Although some of the science is debatable, and confusing, I believe that soaking grains and flour prior to cooking/baking has improved my digestion, see more here ). The sourdough that we made at the workshop was HEAVY!  And I know that it was a really HEALTHY heavy, but I can't se...

I have been waiting to do this course for SO long!   Elisabeth Fekonia is a practising permaculturist who grows and produces much of her own food on her property at Cooroy, Sunshine Coast, QLD.  Among other things, she runs workshops on cheese (which we went to last year ) and sourdough and fermented food.  Since I did the cheese workshop and learnt so much about fermented food from Elisabeth, I really wanted to do this course as well.  I was hoping that she would de-mistify sourdough for me, and she didn't disappoint! Elisabeth has a very practical approach, her methods use common household equipment, are as quick and cheap and "no-fuss" as possible, and are definitely not overcomplicated.  This is what I learnt about sourdough and fermented foods..... Sourdough We only had one day for the workshop and sourdough takes longer than a day to make as it needs to ferment for 12-24 hours, so we kind of started in the middle and worked around to the star...

Continuing my review of Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats , this was such a huge chapter for me, I want to review it by itself. See the other parts of my review - introduction , mastering the basics , more chapters .... The main idea is that grains and legumes require careful preparation to ensure that the nutrients are completely available.  This means soaking and fermenting overnight, or at least several hours, and no quick boiling methods!  It also includes sprouting the grains first. I've always known that I had trouble digesting grains, but I didn't understand why.  I tried eating gluten free, but it didn't help, so I went back to eating bread and flour again.  I tried eating brown rice, but I never liked it.  I've never really enjoyed beans/legumes, they always make me feel overfull.  With all this in mind, I was very keen to try the suggestions in this chapter. Whole grai...