Spring has sprung!

I've been feeling great this week!

Two reasons (I think):

Early morning running

I've been walking to work and back most days for a few weeks, but I've added in a morning run too. I get up just before 6 and go out for half an hour, then back in for a shower, brekkie and then walk to work. It's great. I have loads of energy. I was tired this morning and didn't really fancy it, but got up at half 8 and forced myself out the door. However, it was such a fantastic morning, and already getting warm (for April in Northern Ireland) and I had a great 45 min run HIIT-style. Thanks to Angela @ OhSheGlows for inspiring me. You get such a high from HIIT! I got in and had a mango, passionfruit and ginger smoothie with my...

Live, homemade vegan yogurt

This stuff seems to be doing wonders for my digestion. My digestive transit seems to have moved up a gear and I've had a cramp-free week. I think the running might be helping my digestion too, but I'm sure all those friendly bacteria have had their part to play too.

The first batch was a bit hit and miss consistency-wise, but had the flavour I've been hankering for- mild, "bland" as people describe dairy yogurt, but with a real sharpness. The problem with the consistency was that I didn't blend the xanthan gum very well so it had little beads of gum in it and was a bit runny. However when chucked in a blender for a smoothie it thickened up quite a lot! So I used this idea for my next batch; I put 15g sugar, contents of two probiotic capsules and 5g xanthan gum in the blender and dumped in a litre of Oatly oat milk.

It got quite thick and bubbly from just a minute or two of blending! A video was the best way of demonstrating the texture change from watery oat milk to this:

It's now fermenting in my new electric yogurt maker.

I think this, combined with the thorough blending and probiotic powder will give me better results. I noticed HEAB has been experimenting with non-dairy yogurt too, using a different milk and thickening agent.

Overnight oats seem to be everywhere this week too, Angela blogged about hers, and this morning's Guardian had an article.

After run, brekkie, catching up on the news and de-sweatifying, E and I went to an allotment meeting. We have a polytunnel and were working out how to utilise the space. We've decided to divide the polytunnel into areas for each type of crop so that everyone can get to try something out and it'll help share the responsbility of watering. Apart from the usual suspects of tomatoes, peppers and chillis, we are going to get some aubergine plants and try out cucumbers and melons!! I'm so excited. As the weather is so great, E and I are going to get our allotment cleared of weeds tomorrow and monday. Photos to follow! As it's our first year, we're not growing anything super fussy; three types of kale, purple sprouting broccoli, kabocha and buttercup squash and dwarf french beans. Lots more on the allotment in the next few days. And also the results of batch 2 of oat milk yogurt:)

Birchermuesli (aka Swiss-style overnight oats)

Last night I whipped up an old favourite:

1 apple, grated, skin and all

1/4 cup jumbo oats

1/2 cup oat milk

1/2 cup frozen raspberries

Then cover the bowl and leave it in the fridge overnight.

Next morning, I stirred in some of my raspberry oat milk yogurt and half a big banana.

This was soo good! Even though the oat milk and yogurt are fairly light, the whole combo tasted really creamy and the apple and raspberry gives it plenty of sweetness.

I got myself properly hungry for my breakfast this morning; I took a leaf out of Farty Girl's book and got up before sunrise for a nice run. I felt so energised the rest of the day!

Eats for the rest of the day were banana, kiwi and carrot sticks with homemade hummus. I have to confess to a small coffee after lunch...whoops! But nothing kills hummusy garlic breath like a cup of the bean..aaah. Now I'm hungry again! I walked to and from work and went for a little coffee walk in the middle of the day too. Time to whip up a green veggie concoction!

Get Cultured! Part 3b

Part 3 was about my sauerkraut and oatgurt failures. Well, I've turned one of them into a success- I used my oatgurt to make bread, and it is so YUMMY!

I made up some no-knead bread:

450g strong bread flour

320g lukewarm water

1/8 tsp yeast

10g salt

All of the oatgurt (about 650g, originally 2 cups of pinhead oatmeal soaked in 2 cups of water)

Just mix everything up and leave it in a covered bowl for 12-18 hours. It'll be all puffy with air pockets. I had intended at this stage to add a cup or 2 of grated apple, but then I thought leaving it out would make the bread more 'multi-purpose', I could eat it with anything if it was just plain. But I reckon it would be great with apple, and maybe some jumbo oats or sunflower seeds chucked in too.

I stretched and folded the dough, plopped it on a sheet of floured greaseproof paper and dumped the lot in my cast iron pot, sprinkled some jumbo oats over the top, put the lid on and left it to sit somewhere warm for about 2.5 hours. Then I put the pot in the oven, turned it right up to the max heat, and left it for about 50 minutes before taking the lid off, and giving it another 40 minutes lid off.

This was the nicest bread I've made to date! It was a beautiful colour too. I love the way this bread is probably quite like how people used to make bread, i.e. using a mash of the grain rather than a milled flour and leaving it to sit around for days. The oatgurt was 3 days in the making, and then the bread dough was about 18 hours from first mixing to baking. The longer the grains or flour have to ferment, the more complex and rich the flavour. It begins to taste like biting into a field of golden oats, swaying in the hot August sun...yum.

I had some bread for lunch with a little bit of soup, hummus and cucumber

Look at how light the crumb is! I thought with that oat mash it would be quite a dense bread. I was very pleasantly surprised.

Some other eats:

I had a smoothie this morning for the first time in ages! I've been eating porridge for breakfast nearly every day with various toppings but fancied a change, something fruit-based now that the weather is starting to warm up a bit. I didn't depart too far from the oat theme, I used oat milk as the liquid and a tablespoon of oat bran for little fibre boost. The rest of the smoothie was frozen raspberries and a nice ripe banana. On the smoothie note- I've tried green smoothies, and it's just not my thing. It just does seem right? I guess I prefer chewing my greens and I like my smoothies fruity. That said, I got some matcha green tea recently and I was thinking that it might make a nice addition to a morning smoothie, it would also turn it green, without being cabbagey. But we'll see. For now I like them pink.

I'm still loving my greens'n'grains dinners: this was brown rice with kale, leeks, mushrooms and some sunblush tomatoes. The sauce is just vegan mayo (Plamil brand) with lots of Dijon mustard, tarragon and parsley. Without the tomatoes it would have been macro-friendly, but they really lifted this.

Tonight I had a baked potato, something I haven't had in a while! I mixed up some vegan "butter", nooch and sundried tomato and smooshed this into the potatoes and stuck them back in the oven while I cooked some green beans (I LOVELOVELOVE these things). I served the beans in more Dijon mustard and olive oil, and topped the baked potatoes with a nice big dollop of hummus.

Oh, I made oat milk yogurt too- it smells lovely and yogurty, but it was quite thin. Still, I'm glad I now have a non-soy yogurt to put in my smoothies and over my porridge. I tried using xanthan gum to thicken it but as the xanthan thickens as soon as it hits liquid, it's hard to stop it clumping up. I'm either going to find a way to get it better blended into the oat milk, or leave it out altogether. I'll do a separate blog post on oat milk yogurt once I've tried out my new electric yogurt maker (I used the EasiYo for last night's batch). It's not that I'm trying not to eat soy, I just don't like the beaniness in yogurt. But the brand I bought to start my oat yogurt off, Sojade, is quite nice. Not sour enough though, which is always a failing in non-dairy yogurts I've tried, but it wasn't very beany which is good.

Back to work tomorrow, boo. This will be the real test for my coffee habit, as my boss drinks a lot of coffee and we always go for coffee together or share a French press at tea time. My office is a tip at the moment, I'm in the middle of archiving a decade's worth of testing records (and we test ~60,000 donations a year, and ~40,000 antenatal samples too). Perhaps I'll stick some photos up this week.

Get Cultured! Part 3 (kinda)

My next fermented foods project was to be sauerkraut. In an earlier blog, I posted my recipe and technique and then I waited a while (a week-ish). It definitely had got sour, and it didn't smell vile, but it wasn't a smell that appealed to my tastebuds. So it's sitting in my fridge, uneaten. I haven't summoned the courage to taste it. I'm a coward, I know. Thing, is, I love cabbage, and it doesn't give me digestive trouble. I just wanted some bacteria with my veggies, but I just cannot associate the smell with something I'd want to eat, and that's even with all the ginger and fennel I put in.

So feeling rather down about the sauerkraut project "failing", and feeling guilty because it only did so because I'm a bit fussy, I threw myself into another fermented foods project so I could forget the sauerkraut incident. I decided to use a base product that I love- oats, one of my four favourite foods (oats, cruciferous vegetables of any kind, chocolate, peanut butter). I covered 2 cups of steel cut oats/pinhead oatmeal with 2 cups of water and left it for about 12 hours, maybe more? I then blended the lot up, I think I put some more water in, but not much. It didn't go completely smooth like I hoped it might. I stuck the mix in a jar and left it in the hotpress. After 48 hours I could see the fermentation bubbles and it smelled like sourdough starter, that is to say, yeasty, beery even, but not like yogurt, which I sort of hoped it would. The smell of it while warm was a bit weird (I wouldn't fancy shovelling my sourdough starter into me) so I hoped giving it a good chilling before eating would help. The bad sign is I'm not really excited about trying this. It's been in the fridge from almost 12 hours and I can think of loads of other things I'd rather eat instead. But this time I'm going to be brave. The thing is, if I don't like it as is, I reckon it'll make some nice oat sourdough bread. I could just lift it out of the fridge, bring up to room temperature, and add it to some rye sourdough starter and wholemeal flour, maybe a little more liquid and some salt.

While the oatgurt was doing its things in the hotpress, I got researching all thing fermenty and oaty. And lo- and behold, someone has written their PhD on oat yogurt!!

Lactic Acid Fermentations in Oat-Based Suspensions

I had already heard about a Finnish company, Bioferme, who make an oat milk yogurt called Yosa. I think the PhD might be tied up in the whole creation of the product. I wish, oh I wish, that Yosa was available to buy in the UK. But it seems not to have spread beyond Finland. Interestingly, Finland produce more oats than any other country in Europe. Sounds like my kind of place (except in winter obviously).

I know I'll be waiting quite a while for Yosa to hit any shop shelves near me, so I read the PhD and reckon I can get my oat milk yogurt at home. I bought a yogurt maker from ebay and it turns out the oat milk I buy is one of the types used by Dr Martensson in his research. The oat milk making process was invented at his university, as far as I can tell. All I needed was some bacteria, so this morning I bought some live soy yogurt to start my yogurt off with. According to Plant Foods, oat milk makes a yogurt with a lot of waste liquid, but the yogurt itself is creamy and delicious, especially strained, so I bought some muslin squares to try this out too.

All in all, it's starting to look like I will have yogurt again. Yogurt is the only food E and I really miss since going vegan and we hated the soy yogurt. On top of this desire for yogurtiness, I want to include more live bacteria in our diet. So it's good these aims might be able to coincide. So Part 3b will be me trying out my oat milk yogurt. My electric yogurt maker I bought off ebay probably won't arrive until after Easter, but I have an old EasiYo maker at my parent's house which I'm going to dig out tomorrow, so hopefully I'll be able to try the oat milk yogurt as early as monday...and I'll probably be baking oat sourdough too...

Other things:

I loved Gena's coffee post. It really resonated with my own views on the health and pleasure aspects of eating and drinking.

"On the other hand, maybe there’s a food that isn’t nutritionally ideal, but it gives my client a great deal of pleasure, and helps him or her not to feel deprived, which in turn helps maintain balance. In those cases, I’ll always say that the food should stay in my client’s life. Living without pleasure does not fit into my definition of health...And since my own vision of health includes certain things that aren’t necessarily biologically ideal, but boost our pleasure and enhance our waking experience, a little bit of coffee in the morning is actually not so very out of keeping with my own talk"

I've always liked coffee, but I go through phases of drinking it everyday and then just occasionally. I know when I drink 2+ cups a day my digestion just isn't as good. So I'm going to try and limit myself to one cup of good coffee a day, at the most. I don't want to give it up, but I am a bit worried about my sudden increase in coffee consumption hence the desire to give myself a coffee rule. But as Gena points out, when you're good about so many other things, it's ok to have a few less-than-perfect habits. Not bad, just not perfect either, and a little but more vigilance is sometimes required.

My other naughty foods are chocolate and peanut butter, but for a different reason- I believe they are not inherently imperfect as coffee is, it's my inability to stop once I pop. I find it very hard to open a jar of peanut butter and leave it out without taking more. Chocolate is the same, I can't open a bar and leave it unfinished, although I have kept unopened bars for heroically long stretches of time before succumbing. Both these foods upset my stomach when I eat large quantities and they are also pretty energy dense, something I can't justify if I've already eaten a decent dinner and I haven't done much exercise. So the plan is to go chocolate free for seven days starting next tuesday, and also start my new coffee rule, and see do I see any benefits healthwise. That means no instant coffee, and it means no more than one cup a day, and that before 12pm, because it does make me a little jumpy.

Here I am earlier today enjoying a saturday Starbuck's visit, sipping on a soy flat white in my vegan tshirt:

Yum!

Like Gena, it's not the caffeine I crave, it's the pleasure of the ritual, the smell and the feel of the beans as I scoop them into the grinder, the warm cup in my hands. It feels like a big treat and we all need pleasure in our lives, especially, I believe, those of us who sacrifice other pleasures for longer terms goals, i.e. good health throughout our lives and choosing not to consume other animals.

As for the Starbucks thing, yes, I go there. I have a Starbucks portable coffee mug and a loyalty card. Shoot me. It's the only place in Belfast I can get a soy coffee with my favourite ordinary dark chocolate (Divine), they sell my favourite newspaper, they're the closest coffee shop to my work, and the other branch in the town centre is conveniently between the health food and natural beauty products shops that I go to. With the card, my soy doesn't cost me any extra too. I'd love to support local independent coffee shops, but until they support me with a decent dairy free coffee, I'm spending my coffee allowance at the 'evil' multinational.

I was reading an article earlier about self discipline. I tend to think I'm quite lazy, but in reality I suppose I'm not really, I am, however, a perfectionist. I still think I could use some of the article's suggestions, and not to curb my imagined laziness, but to convince myself I'm not as lazy as I seem to think. Hopefully proving this to myself will make me a little bit more positive about my productivity. I've decided to try the Pomodoro technique out- but only at work to begin with. It would be mad to bring too much control and guilty into my non-work activities Shout out if you have any experience of/opinions on time management tools.

Oh, I nearly forgot! I won Meghan's 5 Days Low GI Challenge. I got lots of lovely free e-tutorials. Thanks Meghan!!! I'm especially enjoying her own story, The Healthy Cookie: Unbaked. I really must do a low GI post soon...

Right, I'm off now to enjoy the rest of my saturday- a quick work out, some steamed cauliflower (craving this aaaall day) and quinoa and then out to the pub with E, his brother and brother's fiancée. I haven't had alcohol in ages, and as I have an early start I'm in two minds about having one drink or sticking to ginger beer. I think having an alcoholic drink might be a good way of proving to myself I can break rules and not feel bad:) Milk thistle tablets at the ready then!

Doughy delight- Get Cultured Part 2

Bread comes and goes in my estimation. Sometimes, I think flour is just too processed to justify eating everyday, or even most days. But other times, I crave a perfectly done bit of sour, wholemeal toast with some runny marmalade sinking into it, the toast soaking it up like a sponge but staying nice and crisp around the crust. It's hard to say no to a chunk of just-out-of-the-oven pain de campagne, crust talking away, the dough still steaming when the loaf is torn open. Or an ultra thin square slice of Schwartbrotz, spread with tapenade and cucumber...

About a year ago, I really got into baking bread, because I wanted to reclaim that staple food. A shocking >80% of bread made in the UK is made by the Chorleywood process, and ultra speedy way of making bread involving relatively massive quantities of yeast, superspeed dough mixing and lots and lots of additives, some of which don't have to be specifically mentioned on the label. Scary? I thought so. That was when I started reading about sourdough, fresh yeast, oven stones, bacteria, bannetones, proving times, bench knives, stone-ground...it was fun. I had sourdough pizza parties. I learnt so much. I sourced fresh yeast from a local delicatessen that made their own bread, and that was fun for a while. Then I got two starters on the go, a rye and then a wheat started from the rye. And I enjoyed some really tasty bread, but I wasn't eating enough to make it often, I got lazy, and my starters died. Eventually I went back to buying supermarket bread, but I didn't eat it very often. Then, a few months back, I belatedly discovered the no-knead bread phenomenon. I bought a Le Creuset pot for my birthday, and used it more for baking bread than anything else. I love no-knead bread, because I hate kneading. I'm impatient, and giving dough a good enough knead meant get the bench really messy, and I hate tidying up a messy kitchen.

If I can't persuade you to try sourdough, at least try the no-knead bread. I haven't tried it with all-wholemeal, but some folks say it works. I used unbleached stoneground white, and subbed about 10% of the flour weight for wholemeal rye. I always had perfect results. At the beginning I followed the suggestion of pre-heating the pot in the oven and then dumping in the loaf, but I changed to putting the loaf in the cold pot and into a cold oven, and giving it an extra 15 minutes. I found this approach gave me more oven spring (the bread got bigger). It's a super hassle-free way of making great bread, and this didn't tie me to making it all the time. Still, I wanted to get back to making something without baker's yeast.

Recently, I started blogging (more of less coinciding with going vegan again). So why not start up another good habit again? Especially when I was reading about all these wonderful fermented foods other bloggers were eating. It was time to get a starter going.

My previous sourdough research pointed me in the direction of one starter: rye. Rye gets going quickly, and you can use it to make a wheat sour, a spelt sour, whatever. A rye sourdough starter keeps for at least twice as long in the fridge, too, which suits my sporadic breadmaking. The timing of a all-rye sourdough bread fits perfectly with my routine, requires no knead (it can't be kneaded, the dough has to be very wet for rye, otherwise the bread is like concrete), and as I can only get wholegrain (dark) rye flour, it's not *too* processed, and you can always add lots of seeds or sprouted wheat, oat or rye grain to the loaf.

To get a rye starter going, add 25g of rye flour to 50g of water. Keep adding to the mix at the same quantities for a couple of days, and keep it somewhere warmish. Eventually it will bubble up and smell pleasantly sour. If it smells really horrible, throw it out and start again. Depending on how many days you've been adding to your sourdough, you will have a lot more than 50g, which is all you need to keep going for bread making. It's good to keep a little more anyway, just in case something happens when you're making bread that kills the starter, or you want to double a recipe or start a wheat sourdough. I also think having extra on the go is good if you're going to bake bread less frequently than say, twice a month, the bigger quantity of sourdough, the chances of the yeast population staying viable. 150g is a good amount. Building up your starter when you're not actively making bread- just add 25g of flour, and 50g of water. Simple. If you've got too much, throw out the extra, or give to a friend (I've never found anyone mad enough to want to take mine off my hands).

Ok. Now you've got your sourdough starter. Getting deeply attached to it is optional. As you will see, you don't need to feed it all the time like a pet. It's just flour and water that bacteria and yeasts have grown in. Realising this and just getting on with making bread will keep you safe from requiring sourdough bereavement counselling.

Russian Rye Bread (adapted from Andrew Whitley's Bread Matters)

Production sourdough:

50g rye sourdough starter

150g wholemeal (dark) rye flour

300g water at 40 degrees centigrade

Mix all this up into a sloppy dough, and leave to sit, covered and in a warm place, for 12-24 hours. I would do this about 9pm, and leave it until I'm home from work the next day, around 5-5:30pm, that's a rise time of 20-20.5 hours.

When I get in, I make the final dough.

440g production sourdough (the remainder is your starter for the next batch)

330g rye flour

5g sea salt

200g water at 40 degrees centigrade

(total 975g)

Optional: 1 cup of seeds and/or grains (I used sunflower and pumpkin seeds, for grains/groats, soak for at least 8 hours, or ideally let them sprout)

Mix everything together and slop the runny dough into a greased bread tin and leave to rise for between 2 and 8 hours, depending on how warm it is. If the dough slightly more than half-filled the tin, it should be at the top when it's ready to be baked. Bake for 50-60 minutes in as hot an oven as you can muster, turning it down by 20 degrees after 15 minutes. If baked as two loaves, it'll take 35-45 minutes. Apparently, it's best to leave rye sourdoughs for a full 24 hours before cutting and eating. I've never waited that long, and it's always been great!

While I still think eating bread daily is not as ideal as eating the whole grain, I think the sourdough method makes bread a far healthier option than quick rise yeasted bread. In fact, it's a completely different thing. The long fermenting process makes the grain much more digestible, and may even make gluten-containing flours tolerable by celiacs and those with gluten intolerance (Di Cagno et al, "Sourdough Bread Made From Wheat and Nontoxic Flours and Started with Selected Lactobacilli Is Tolerated in Celiac Sprue Patients, Applied and Environmental Microbiology: Vol. 70 (February 2004), pp. 1088-1095). I thought this was pretty amazing: none of the 17 celiacs in the study reacted to the wheat-containing sourdough bread.

So, sourdough bread has all the benefits of fermented foods (except there are no live bacteria to enhance your intestinal flora, they don't make it through the oven heat- eat your rye with some sauerkraut to correct this). The most significant benefit of eating sourdough bread over other breads and even over wholegrains is the increased bioavailability of minerals. Phytates in grains normally prevent the absorption of calcium, zinc and magnesium. But the long fermenting process frees the minerals from the phytates. Sprouting does the same, which is why if you do eat plenty of wholegrains and don't eat much bread (we're talking sourdough here), then you should sprout as often as you can. But bread isn't just about health- it's a wonderful comfort food. I can testify to the seedy rye being excellent toasted and slathered in some wonderfully sharp homemade grapefruit marmalade. It's also wonderful with hummus, tapenade, pickles and fermented veggies. For all these reasons, I'm going to make a sourdough loaf about once a week or two. I might also revisit the no-knead method to do a wholegrain wheat sourdough. This will mean I'll end up eating bread at maybe 2 meals a week (the rest will be scoffed by my bread-loving boyfriend), which isn't a huge amount of flour, and it's all whole grain:)

Bread resources:

Bread Matters- Andrew Whitley's site

An interview with Andrew Whitley about bread and health

Dan Lepard's website

The Fresh Loaf

The Sourdough Companion community

Get cultured! Part 1

"Support bacteria- they're the only culture some people have" Steven Wright

Yum. Bacteria.

There has been a huge surge of interest in so called 'friendly' bacteria of late, especially in fermented milk products but also a revival in the sourdough tradition and other foods like kefir and kombucha. Fermentation comes from the Latin ferveo, which means boiling, which is kind of self explanatory if you've ever has sourdough culture bubble out of its container and attempt to take over your kitchen, or ever made your own homebrew and woken up to a bang and found glass shards embedded in the cellar wall! I'm happy to report only the former has happened to me.

Farty Girl suggested I do a fermenting tutorial. So I got reading. And, my goodness, there is a wealth of fascinating information out there. Here's a distilled account of my skim reading:

What I've found out is that while we modern folks often view these foods as a kind of supplement to our diet, the most traditional foods of almost all cultures are cultured foods- think koji, sauerkraut, mead, tempeh, amazake, pastrami, sourdough, beer, kefir, wine, kimchi...these foods are the first examples of people taking a raw food substance, like a bag of grain or a vegetable, and working it in some way that keeps it good for far longer than the raw material, makes it more digestible and often better-tasting. I also love the way many of these traditional, cultured foods actually MAKE culture. Granny teaches her grandkids how to make umeboshi, or sourdough, or gives her daughter her kombucha culture or some rye sourdough starter. These acts strengthen ties, they forge a cultural identity. It's not surprising that the culture "soups" for these foods have names like "mother" and "daughter".

But as it turns out, granny doesn't work alone when she makes her magic foods. She has special helpers; bacteria, moulds and yeasts- depending on the food involved- in some cases it's a symbiosis of two or more, e.g yeasts and lactobacilli bacteria in the case of sourdough.

Lactobacilli are probably the most common microorganisms involved in cultured foods. They also live in our guts (I'll come back to this in a minute). They're what makes sauerkraut sauerkraut and not rotten cabbage, they make yogurt and not rotten milk. It's amazing that through cultured foods, we also work in cooperation with those ancient ancestors of ours- the bacteria get somewhere nice to live and all the food they want, and we get...well, keep reading to find out.

Aside from all the wonderful cultural bonding these foods bring about, they have lots of other lovely benefits:

As already mentioned above, fermentation makes things last longer. A jar of sauerkraut will only be getting good when a cabbage has all but rotted away. Your unleavened flatbreads baked in the morning will be tough and stale twelve hour later, but your rye sourdough loaf will make good eating for a week, and it will be even longer before it starts to mould. Although it might start to get a bit tough.

As well as making the food keep for longer, fermentation preserves the nutrients in the food- that's why Captain James Cook packed his ships with sauerkraut (and why German sailors are nicknamed krauts)-the vitamin C doesn't oxidise as the kraut is kept submerged in the brine- the lactobacilli respire anaerobically, so the sailors didn't get scurvy.

Not only does fermentation protect the nutrients in the food, it actually *increases* the bioavailability- the bacteria break down the larger molecules of proteins and lipids into simpler amino acids and fatty acids, on other words, the bacteria do some of the hard work of digestion, while letting you have the goodies- and giving your pancreas a well deserved break. In a separate post about sourdough, I'm going to go into little more detail in relation to the protein gluten. Other increases in bioavailablity happen in sourdough- the longer fermentation results in the liberation of minerals from phytates and oxalates in the grain. This is excellent news for everyone, it means you can eat wholemeal bread and enjoy the benefits of the fibre, but also get all the vitamins and minerals.

I want to separately mention the effects of fermentation on carbohydrates as I think it's especially important to IBS sufferers- the breaking down of the carbohydrates in the food render them much more digestible. Famous examples are fermented soy products and yogurt. Soy and lactose are notoriously indigestible in their raw forms, the bacteria render these foods a much lighter load on the system. You IBSers are bound to know about farting. You will know that gas is produced by the bacteria in your colon as they digest carbohydrates. The bacteria in your sauerkraut have already done that digestion before you eat the food. The gas explosion has happened outside of you, in a container. See all those bubbles in your sourdough starter, or in your jar of sauerkraut? Because of the lactobacilli, those bubbles are happening there and not in your tumtum- thank them!

As I mentioned above, lactobacilli live in our gut. By eating fermented foods, you're adding reinforcements- contributing to intestinal microflora, as it's often put.

After reading about all those wonderful benefits, I'm desperate to try lots more fermented foods. To date, I've only tried making a few different things- sourdough, yogurt, and very recently, sauerkraut. Over the next few days, I'm going to introduce you to these cultured aristocrats of the food world- some factoids, a bit of history lesson, some resources to check out and a practical how-to based on my own experiments.

For now, I leave you with two smashing resources I've found over the last few days:

http://www.wildfermentation.com/- website by the author of the book of the same name. I fully intend to buy this book now, and also a book called Nourishing Traditions

http://users.sa.chariot.net.au/~dna/index.html- this is Thee Last Word in all things cultured. Visiting this website is in the Top 10 Things To Do Before You Die. The dude is the Culture Guru.

Nightie night Dukka readers- the weekend is over for me. It promises to be a very cultured and also very low GI week. I shall be good company, with my sugar free zen-like state of mind and snobby cultural activities:)

Fermenting friday

It's true that I have a bit of a thing for sensationalist news. I like to get myself all fired up and rant about the overwhelming abundance of stupidity out there. Today's find is a classic:

The Woman Who Wants to be Obese (The Guardian)

*deep breath* I don't think I need to say why I think this is sick.

Aaanyway. Today I am fermenting.

Pre-squishing- cabbage, salt, ginger, fennel seeds.

Post-squish

I stuffed it all in a jar, and there wasn't much liquid. So I squished some more, using a small jar to push it down. And...

I got more liquid out of it once it was in the jar, and it squished down quite a bit. I put a big cabbage leaf over the top, then stuck the lid on.

I've got some production rye sourdough on the go too.

Not sure what to do with the production sourdough, whether to make Borodinsky bread (with molasses, barley malt and coriander seeds) or a seeded rye, with lots of lovely buttery sunflower and pumpkin seeds. I have eight hours to make up my mind anyway! I'll have leftover production sourdough for the next loaf, so hopefully my rad (I'm keeping this mispelling of red, because it's so true, although the cabbage is more purple than red) sauerkraut will be ready to eat with some rye sourdough! According to my sister's Russian housemate, Russians have a pretty high incidence of colon cancer. This crossed my mind while I was in the kitchen this morning and for a split second I was reconsidering this sauer and sour combo. However, I reckon this is what's wrong with the Russian diet- they do eat rye bread and sauerkraut, but they eat with with a whole pile of meat. My meal will be high on the sauerkraut, with a little bread, and probably a big mixed salad on the side, which is what this friend of my sister's says is pretty low in the Russian diet-fresh vegetables. And they don't eat much fresh fruit either. So I reckon my colon is pretty safe!

I was very good at breakfast this morning- I had pinhead (steelcut) oatmeal with hummus instead of fruit or sugar! Go sugar free me!

I love these bowls- this one has a very pronounced spiral pattern that you get to see when you scoff all your oats. I got them at the Christmas Craft market at St George's Market.