Author: Alison Kay

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!

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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

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If you struggle with liver, make pate. And not just any pate; this pate. Thank you @almostbananas for sharing the joy you get from cooking ancestrally, including your live pate recipe, with the world!
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I used 1kg of pig liver (pigs loved during life by @valledelsasso), half lard/half butter as the fat and followed Naomi’s spicing instructions to the letter. A quick blend in the food processor and I now have a *lot* of pate (half of which I have frozen).
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So far, we’ve eaten in spread on sourdough (a great protein-rich snack option, straight from the fridge), as the filling for sourdough pancakes (along with lettuce and grated carrot) and, my favourite, scooped up in large amounts by crunchy oven-roasted pork skin!
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Check out my story for more pictures. I’ve linked to Naomi’s recipe there so you can cook this up in your kitchen. And if you want to hear more from Naomi, check out episode #23 of @ancestralkitchenpodcast where you can hear me interviewing her!

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Another sourdough carrot and spelt cake about to go into the oven.
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I’ve been recipe testing and covering my camera in flour and fat most of this week. Here’s what I’ve been making:
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Rye breads for my upcoming course at @thefermentationschool (I filmed the “what to do with sourdough discard” section yesterday).
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Pig skin crunchies. I filmed each step for a potential YouTube video and gave a bag of the finished goods to my son to take on his first ever cinema trip (who needs popcorn when you’ve got pig skin?!)
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Lard. The fridge is full of the white stuff and we have cracklings which I made into crackling bread (a recipe I’m testing to accompany an upcoming article I’m writing for the Weston A. Price journal)
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Liver pate using @almostbananas recipe. Delicious! Photos of that to come next week.
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And lastly, more of this delicious egg and dairy free sourdough cake. I will write up the recipe soon and share.
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Meantime, this weekend, I’m taking a rest 🙂 I’m getting better at coming off SM completely for two whole days. Some Sundays I don’t even pick up a computer. We’ll see whether I manage that this weekend.
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What have you been creating this week?

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This is what excited oats look like! I came into the kitchen this morning to find this jar of oats and water had fermented it’s way up, and almost out, of the jar.
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There is no starter here; the mix is just oats and water. The power of natural yeasts and bacteria never fails to astound me!
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I stirred this jar, re-mixing the solids, then re-covered it and put it back to continue doing its thing. In a few days time from this I’ll have ‘sowans’ porridge and ‘swats’ probiotic drink. Both are traditional Scottish ferments.
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This is my favourite way to ferment oats. I shared it in my video course over at @thefermentationschool. There’s a link to it in my story today if you want to take a look.

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