Our Urban Homestead adventures continue. We have continued pickling, or more correctly lacto-fermenting, and that has gone better some times than others. This most recent time we added more garlic and dill with the cucumber pickles and they came out very tasty. Another time we tried pickling brussel sprouts and it fizzed quite a bit and lost a lot of liquid, with the vegetables exposed to air we got scared and threw that batch out, I think the key is to leave more of an air gap for expansion and tighten the jars real good. This has been fun and also seems to be more sustainable. Rather than buying jars of pickles and sauerkraut we buy fresh food, mason jars (reusable), and salt and we are off, reducing our need for single use glass jars.
Then we tried making sour dough starter. Pretty funny for two people who claim to be mostly paleo eaters avoiding the #1 enemy, gluten! So buying a large bag of white flour at the store was entertaining for us. On a side note this blog discusses the background of sourdough and suggests that sourdough may have much less gluten because of the fermenting process. So, after reading that, I ran with it. After 7 days of feeding our sour dough starter we made sour dough pancakes - delicious! This also provided us with an excuse to eat maple syrup which didn’t hurt. We wanted to feed our sour dough for two full weeks before trying the bread. The bread making was a bit of a disaster. The recipe we used provided the flour and sour dough starter amounts in ounces. We used our bathroom scale which measured to the nearest 0.2 lbs to do the best we could. Imagine two engineers with a bath scale, recipe, and calculator, I mean how did they make bread in the good ole days?! We ended up with dough that was way to sticky, seemingly for the two bread making experts that we are, so we threw in extra flour until it was better. We hand kneaded it, let it sit on the counter, let it proof in the fridge with our make shift proofing cloth, more counter sitting and then baked the damn thing. Neither of us thought it would work, but it turned out to be the most beautiful, tasty, sourdough bread I could have imagined. Elliott posted some pics on his blog: http://elliottgoodwin.com/post/4915567841#disqus_thread. The sourdough starter has been relegated to the fridge as I am tired of feeding it although we can bring it back out, feed it a bit and bring it back to life again when we are craving pancakes!
The last thing we tried recently was Filmjölk. This is a fermented dairy product. I ordered cultures from GEM cultures who interestingly enough I had to print and mail a request to, no internet forms or payments for them, these culture people are really old school! You create a starter using the cultures that come in the mail and then you mix this into milk and leave it on the counter overnight to ferment, I guess this is the part that wierds people out, it didn’t really bother me. I was hoping for a result close to yogurt although it turns out fil is much more liquidy. I didn’t mind the taste although being that I really was looking for a substitute to buying greek yogurt in plastic bins it wasn’t what we wanted. We drank some of it although ultimately abandoned it. I think next time I would try these dry cultures and in the greek yogurt variety: http://www.culturesforhealth.com/greek-yogurt-starter.html. I read the liquid fresh cultures are better but the fil just didn’t fit the bill. The other thing is I am thinking of going on a dairy hiatus for a while to get back to a more of a strict paleo diet just to see if I feel different so I think I will wait on another culture adventure.
Our next homestead project will be to learn to use natural cleaning products to clean our house, baking soda and vinegar. This fits with slightlysustainable as well as our homesteading efforts and will just make our house cleaner in multiple ways!
