There’s a wealth of fat-enriched breads in many cuisines because we’ve known, for a very long time, that fat and bread are so good together. The Italian recipe litany, where this bread originates, is no exception! Fat-enriched breads were particularly … Read More
I *love* drizzling an abundance of olive oil on my pizza after it has come out of the oven.
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@farmandhearth and I just recorded an @ancestralkitchenpodcast on fats. Talking about them reminded me of the first time I experienced fresh, made-with-love, local olive oil here in Italy.
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It was a world away from the sad jar of oil that sat in my Mum’s UK kitchen cupboard when I was growing up. The local one was green, it was cloudy and man, it was peppery!
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And that makes sense. The olive trees are here in Italy, not in the UK. The fruit can go from tree to press to bottle to my pizza without having to involve miles of transportation and months of sitting on shelves.
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It was clear when Andrea and I talked for the podcast that we both overwhelmingly use the fats that are around us geographically. As would have 99% of those who came before us. Fat transportation and marketing is a very recent part of our food history.
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The episode will come out at the beginning of June. Meantime, whether you want to put butter, tallow, lard or olive oil on your pizza, there’s a recipe for this sourdough spelt base in my profile.
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Thanks to @tibiona.italia for the flour, @fontedeiserri for the raw grass-fed cow’s milk mozzarella, @vicaspontassieve for the olive oil and #mercatointransizione for a lot of the other toppings!
Here’s yesterday’s rye sourdough – yes, I’ve managed to leave it 24 hours without cutting/eating in order to benefit from the flavour-deepening that happens in rye breads in the day after they are baked.
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Now I get to tuck in. I’m thinking some butter first, then some left over chicken from the roast at the weekend.
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Next week, I’m planning to film the making of this bread from start to finish (lots of camera pointing at my hands action!). I’m including it in my upcoming course, Rye Sourdough: Mastering the Basics. I’m hoping that the course will be up at @thefermentationschool in early June.
Experiments aren’t always pretty…especially half way through. This feels like a good motto for in and outside the kitchen! It’s played out here in my wet-cured lard that’s 6 weeks into it’s process.
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Lardo is the cured version of lard. It’s famously dry cured, traditionally in marble basins. But I read about another type hailing from northern Italy that is cured in salt water. Piecing together a process from various documents, I decided to have a go…and here’s where we are 6 weeks in.
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The mix has seen some of the flavourings and fat rise to the top. It smells OK and all looks good under the plastic ring that I’m using to hold the fat under the salt water.
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Still, I’m waiting….perhaps another month. Then I might try some.
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There’s a little film in my story today. I had to get down on my knees in our porch (the only place I could find to store this) to film it!
Sausage on a bed of broth-cooked sorghum topped with a tomato sauce made with lardo.
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Sausage from Flavio @valledelsasso just around the corner.
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Broth-cooked sorghum has been a staple in my kitchen since I found it was grown in Italy. So many people I talk to do not know what sorghum is. It’s gluten and lectin-free, it’s tasty and still has a bite when cooked and you can use it like you would rice (or here as you would pasta) in a dish. (There’s a recent @ancestralkitchenpodcast episode on broth if you want more stock inspiration).
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Pig fat was the traditional base for tomato sauce in Italy until very recently. I used lardo (which is cured – there are some pictures of how I cured my own in my story highlights). It imparts such lush texture and deep flavour to the end result that I’m not going back to olive oil.
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I’m doing this sauce again later in the week to get more photos for my upcoming #wapf article on Italian fats through history.
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Have you made tomato sauce with pig fat, lard or lardo?
I’ve just started reading ‘A Strangeness in my Mind’, a novel that centers around a boza-seller who works the streets of Istanbul. It is deepening my understanding and appreciation of this drink, boza, that I make every week in my kitchen.
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It’s fermented. It’s probiotic. It’s gluten-free and dairy-free. It’s ever-so-slightly alcoholic (a by-product of the yeast fermentation). It’s bubbly. It’s sweet. It’s sour.
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And it has a very long and rich history in Turkey and beyond. Men and boys used to wander the streets of Istanbul every evening with jugs of this hanging off milkmaid-style planks over their shoulders. They called out “boooozzaaa” to let people know they were there and very often people living on the 3rd/4th floors would lower a basket on a piece of string from their windows to receive their drink.
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There aren’t many boza-sellers left in Istanbul now (stronger, industrially-produced drinks have taken over), although there are still some historic boza bars were people can buy this drink.
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Two years ago I went on a quest to figure out how to make this drink at home, using wild fermentation (i.e. no store-bought yeast). Now, learning more about its provenance, I feel privileged to be able to recreate an historic, much-loved beverage in my kitchen and feed it to my family.
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If you’d like to bring this drink to life in your own home, check the link halfway down my linktr.ee page that’ll take you to the course I have created.
New recipe up! If you like cake and you like sourdough (I’m imagining lots of hands up now), this is a simple, tasty sourdough cake with a light and tender crumb.
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It doesn’t use eggs and there’s no dairy or refined sugar either. The rising power comes form the sourdough starter, the sweetness comes from carrot and honey and the tender crumb is helped immensely by the inclusion of lard.
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Seriously, I tried baking this with olive oil (which you can do if you like) and then with lard instead. It’s softer with the lard. I haven’t tried butter (let me know if you do), but I bet that’d be good too.
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There’s a link to the recipe at the very top of my linktr.ee.
Making a cake should be easy. But what if you can’t eat eggs, you don’t use refined sugar and you want it to be sourdough? That’s where this recipe came from and if you want to have a go, you’ll … Read More
It costs twice as much, by weight, to buy plastic-wrapped chicken breasts than it does to purchase a whole chicken. And yet they fly off the supermarket shelves, bringing with them their additional packaging and transportation and leaving us poorer both financially and nutritionally.
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Buying a whole chicken from your local farmer is a whole different game. Knowing what it has been fed and how it has lived. Cooking it up in one go and allowing the leftovers to make your life easier. Boiling up the bones and getting the nutritional powerhouse that is stock.
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Today’s podcast episode is dedicated to whole chickens. @farmandhearth rears her own and has much to say about how they live and eat. We both use whole birds often and talk about how we chop, cook and eat them. There are some surprises in there – like what broth Andrea uses to make hot chocolate with stock and just how much the broth from a whole chicken would cost you to buy in the store.
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And we’ve got a bonus for patrons of the podcast: Andrea sharing a way of cutting up a whole chicken that you won’t find on YouTube that divides the meat and bones equally between the portions.
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Listen by finding Ancestral Kitchen Podcast in your app or by clicking on the link in my linktr.ee. And if you’d like to support the podcast and become a receiver of our goodies you can go to www.patreon.com/ancestralkitchenpodcast
A whole chicken is one of the most economical meats out there. Listen in to hear Alison and Andrea talk about what you can save through buying a whole bird, what you should look out for when purchasing, along with how they cook whole chickens and how they use the meat and stock.… Read More
