I’ve been making sowans in my kitchen regularly for over five years – I love it – and I have also delved into its history for my forthcoming book on traditional British oat dishes. If you’re curious about sowans, this is the article for you!

Sowans, with a Scottish voice, is pronounced ‘sue-ens’. You might see it spelled ‘sowens’ and in the Shetland Isles it was called ‘Virpa’

History of sowans

Although oats have been eaten in the United Kingdom for thousands of years, widespread oat farming only took hold after the Roman invasion when the troops, in order to feed their horses, brought the oat grain to the British Isles. Oats love the UK’s wet, mild climate and quickly caught on as a staple crop.

Although we don’t find the oat fermentation sowans mentioned in literature until the 1600s, it is very likely, knowing how long parts of the UK have subsisted on oats, that this dish was being made long before that date.

Oats were grown close to home. After harvest, the farmers would sent their sacks of oat grains to the mill to be ground into flour (rolled oats didn’t come onto the scene until much later, read about it in my article Why Our Scottish Ancestors Didn’t Eat Rolled Oats). Once the miller had done his job, the householder would not only get sacks of prepared oats back, but also sacks of ‘waste’ (called sids).

These sids were the hulls that had been knocked off the oats as they were processed. Clinging to them were tiny pieces of the centre of the oat grain – the white, starchy endosperm.

Sowans was a zero-waste food

Instead of being thrown away, this bag of waste, the sids, was transformed, through fermentation, into delicious, nutritious food – sowans.

When mixed with water, these sids contained everything needed to complete the fermentation naturally. The tiny pieces of white starch gave the microorganisms in the ferment starch to feed on, and the hull pieces were a haven for yeasts and bacteria. This means that no inoculant (or starter) was needed to create an active ferment – it was already natively in the grain.

Sowans is a porridge

Once the fermentation was complete, the mixture was put through a sieve which removed the pieces of hull/bran and produced a smooth, white liquid. This liquid, which contained the fermenting water and the tiny pieces of the white oat grain was then cooked to produce a porridge.

Making sowans also creates a probiotic drink called swats

The liquid that the oats were fermented with had it’s own name – swats (or swots). This can be drunk as is (and that way is a live probiotic) or can be cooked along with the sowans and therefore included in the porridge. Often, our ancestors would use a large amount of swats in the saucepan and create a liquidy ‘drinking sowans’.

Sowans was traditionally consumed by the whole family on Christmas Eve which was, in some parts of Scotland, knows as ‘sowans nicht’ (sowans night).

Sowans is a health food

Sowans was considered a health food in Scotland. Diving into the process, it’s easy to see why:

Starting with the raw ingredient – oats, as most of us know, oats are known to be beneficial to health. They have a role to play in lowering cholesterol and maintaining blood sugar levels. They also contain beta-glucan which is a prebiotic – meaning it feeds the probiotics in your intestines.

Both the sowans and swats are probiotic foods. Because we cook the porridge sowans, the live probiotics are lost. That does not mean, however, that all the benefits of the fermentation are lost; the latest research tells us that fermentation microbes which remain behind after cooking are extremely beneficial to our health (read more here).

In addition, because the starch in sowans has been both fermented and pre-digested, it can nourish us with proteins/vitamins and minerals with very little digestive effort. This allows our bodies energy to be used in healing, rather than trying to break down our food.

What does sowans taste like?

I have been making sowans and swats in my kitchen regularly, using modern ingredients and equipment, for years. Myself and my family enjoy the product of this fermentation often and love it.

Sowans is creamy and smooth – it feels to me like eating clouds! It’s nuanced in flavour – pleasantly tart but with delicious honey aromas that arise from the fermentation.

The liquid that the oats ferment in, swats, is zingy and fresh, reminiscent of watery lemon juice. It is refreshing drunk cold on a hot day but also wonderful warmed and spiced.

How do you make sowans?

We may not grow oats in our backyard or have access to sacks of sids from our local mill, but we can still enjoy the flavour and health benefits of sowans and swats in our kitchens today!

Oats can be fermented with water (I’d recommend a 1:4 ratio of oats to water) for several days, sieved and then cooked up into this historic, traditional dish.

My course, Sowans: The Scottish Oat Ferment, will guide you through the whole process, no matter what grains you have access to or equipment you have in your kitchen. It includes two hours of video guidance and plenty of downloads to keep at hand. I explain what to look for at every stage and how you can ensure you are safely fermenting your grains.

Here’s a little peak at one of the videos included in the course:

How to eat sowans (and swats)

I want to leave you with the ways my family eat sowans and swats:

Sowans porridge:

Most often, I make a thick porridge with sowans by mixing it with double its volume in water. Other times, I cook the fermented oats in the swats liquid (the swats) instead of water.

Traditionally, this was eaten with salt and butter, but it is also delicious with fruit, honey and nuts or any of the toppings we add to porridge/oatmeal these days!

I also love sowans as a mashed potato substitute! Here it is with sausages:

Drinking sowans:

Drinking sowans is a warming, comforting cuppa. Here, I add more liquid before cooking and make a pourable sowans. This is lovely infused with spices and sweetened with honey.

Sowans in baked goods:

Sowans can also be used as an ingredient in baked goods. Sowans scones were popular in Scotland (there’s a recipe for them in my course). I have also used sowans very effectively in bread-baking to make a ‘scald’ for my sourdough breads. Here’s a link to the recipe for the bread if you want to give it a go!

Swats

Swats is wonderful drunk as it is. It is full of probiotics, zingy and really refreshing from the fridge in hot weather.

But the way I drink it most is gently warmed. I love it straight warm – it’s comforting and nourishing drink. But most often I make what I’ve coined as ‘mulled swats’ – I gently warm the swats on the stove with spices – cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cardamon, mace, anise.

Aside from drinking, I have used swats as the liquid part of my sourdough breads and built bread starters (or leavens) using swats. I also use the liquid as a starter in other ferments – anywhere where I need a starter.

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Traditional Scottish Oatcakes

Sourdough Oatcakes

How to Make Fermented Oats

Sourdough rye breads are a staple in my kitchen, made every week. I taught myself the process over a decade ago in order to feed my husband, who has a wheat intolerance. But once I’d tasted home-made sourdough rye myself, I was hooked! Since then I’ve gone on to share my love of baking rye with readers here, on my podcast and with hundreds of students in my course Sourdough Rye Bread: Mastering the Basics.

Why make sourdough rye bread?

I make sourdough rye bread because I love its flavour. But rye has so many more reasons to recommend it:

• Rye is three times lower in gluten than wheat, and the gluten it does contain is of a different nature. This means that those of us who struggle with gluten can often enjoy rye without issues.
• Rye has the highest fibre of all the grains we commonly use in our kitchens.
• Rye is so nutritious – as well as all that fibre it is high in B vitamins and minerals.

Why use wholegrain rye?

All of my sourdough rye breads are made with wholegrain rye. Here’s why I love to use it:

• Including the bran brings so much flavour to the bread; much of the infamous depth of rye (think pumpernickel, rugbrod and all of those German/Eastern European breads) comes from the bran.
• By using the whole grain we are ensuring our cooking is zero waste.
• Most of the fibre content of grains is in the bran; when we include that we get all of the nutrition.

Why make sourdough?

• By using a home-cultured starter (rather than buying a factory-produced yeast) we bring the entire bread-making process into our own kitchens. This is part of taking a stand against our our industrial food system.
• Sourdough brings such wonderful flavours to bread. For rye in particular, the acidity of sourdough matches the robustness of the grain in a wonderful way, creating flavour-heaven!
• In the sourdough process, complex starches are predigested, meaning your tummy has to do less work when it comes to the eating.

What’s important to know about making rye bread

If you’re in the habit of making wheat bread, it’s important to understand that rye is different. Understanding the differences between wheat and rye, when it comes to breadmaking, puts you in a strong position to create wonderful sourdough rye breads. Here’s how I explain it, simply:

Breadmaking with wheat:

When in contact with water, wheat flour produces gluten. This gluten (assisted by kneading) creates a net-like mesh network which traps gases during the fermentation, rising the bread and creating its crumb.

Breadmaking with rye:

When in contact with water, rye flour produces complex carbohydrates called pentosans. These pentosans create a thick starchy gel which traps gases during fermentation, rising the bread and creating its crumb.

At the same time, the rye bread-making process also creates an enzyme called amylase. Amylase breaks down complex carbohydrates into simple sugars. If this happens in your bread, the thick, starchy gel will not be formed and your rye bread will not rise. Amylase cannot survive in an acidic environment hence an important part of the process of making rye bread is to acidify the dough.

You can see me explaining the differences between these two bread-making processes here.

How To Make Sourdough Rye Bread From Scratch

Over years of making 100% wholegrain sourdough rye, I’ve learnt that there are six rules – each of them vital to ending up with a risen, sliceable, delicious bread. They’re important and I want to share them with you here. If you’d like to go straight to my recipe, it’s available as part of my Beginner’s Guide to Wholegrain Rye Sourdough, which you can get, in your inbox, by entering your details below:

1 – Have a strong starter

Having a strong sourdough starter is a vital part of any sourdough bread process.

I recommend making your sourdough starter with wholegrain rye flour, because:

• Rye is a very active flour, naturally containing lots of microbes that will super-charge your ferment.
• Rye hydrates differently to wheat and that results in a sourdough starter that is much easier to maintain (you won’t need to refresh it daily; I attend to mine once a week).

How to switch an existing wheat sourdough starter to rye:

It’s easy to switch an existing wheat flour starter to wholegrain rye. To do this simply start refreshing your sourdough starter with wholegrain rye flour instead of your usual wheat flour. After having done this four or five times they’ll be virtually no wheat flour left in your starter.

If you need help with your sourdough starter, read my blog article explaining how to create and maintain a rye sourdough starter, take a look at my visual guide to sourdough starters or take my pay-what-you-can video course.

If you are concerned about the strength of your sourdough starter, don’t use it to make bread. Be patient and keep working on it until you can see it rising well and consistently.

2 – Use a pre-ferment

To make a good sourdough rye bread utilise a pre-ferment. This helps acidify the dough enough to stop amylase destroying your crumb!

A pre-ferment, simply put, is a very big starter!

With a wheat bread, you mix sourdough starter into your dough. Using a rye pre-ferment, you instead take a sizeable portion of the total flour (usually around 30%), mix it with the sourdough starter and leave it to ferment (usually for 12 hours). When ready, this bubbly pre-ferment is mixed into the remaining ingredients.

3 – Hydrate your loaf well

Wholegrain rye flour is thirsty. Where you may be used to making sourdough breads using a 50 to 60% hydration (a water weight of 50 to 60% of the total flour weight), rye will need more. I often make wholegrain rye bread at a 100% hydration (the same weight of water as flour).

4 – Watch the proof

Once you’ve mixed your active pre-ferment into your remaining ingredients, there’s nothing more to do. Rye bread doesn’t take long to bulk ferment or proof. Make sure you watch the fermentation – it is very easy to leave rye bread too long. Look for a small increase in volume and pinprick holes beginning to appear on the surface of the dough.

5 – Use a baker and cover the bread in the oven

Rye bakes much better in a bread baker – by that I mean a container of metal, ceramic or glass. Having sides to climb up will help your bread rise and give it a much more pleasing aesthetic. The added bonus here is that, when using a tin of some form, there is no need for you to worry about shaping the bread!

Make sure that you cover the baker whilst the bread is in the oven. If your tin does not have a lid you can craft one from aluminium foil.

6 – Let your bread cool before you enjoy it!

Once your rye bread is cooked (I like to see an internal temperature of 95C/200F or above) remove it from the tin and leave it to cool completely before cutting. Rye bread continues to form its crumb whilst cooling and you will spoil it by trying to cut it while it’s still hot. If you can, wait even longer; rye bread improves when left for a day or two after baking.

Frequently-Asked Questions:

How do the timings work for this sourdough rye bread method?

Here’s how I make rye bread in my kitchen:

The evening before I want to bake I create a pre-ferment from my active sourdough starter, leaving it to ferment overnight.

The next morning I retrieve the bubbling pre-ferment and mix it into the rest of my ingredients.

I watch this bulk fermentation carefully and, when it is ready, I put the dough into a pan.

I watch the proofing carefully and, when it is ready, I bake the loaf. This is usually around lunchtime.

I leave this loaf to cool fully, not usually cutting it until the next day.

Hence, if I want to bread for lunch on Monday, I begin it with the pre-ferment on Saturday evening, baking it on Sunday.

How should I store my sourdough rye bread?

Sourdough rye bread ages much better than bread made of other grains. In my experience its flavour improves, when left, for up to 5 days. When first cooked, I leave my bread to fully cool on a cooling rack. After the first slicing, I turn it, crumb down, to stand on my breadboard. After this I move it to a metal bread tin which has small air holes and a wooden lid. A fabric bread bag or paper bag is also a good option.

Does sourdough rye bread freeze?

Yes! Sourdough rye bread freezes much better than bread made of other grains. I often cut loaves and freeze one half for weeks at a time or make two loaves in one go, saving one in the freezer for later. Before placing in the freezer, I bag the loaves in a double layer and ensure I expel all the air before closing.

Can I proof my sourdough rye bread in the fridge?

Yes, this is possible. Sometimes, I will mix the pre-ferment into my remaining ingredients in the evening and then immediately place the dough into my fridge. In the morning I remove the dough from the fridge, place it in the pan to proof and bake mid-morning.

Is rye gluten-free?

No, rye is not gluten-free but it contains much less gluten than wheat and the gluten it contains is of a different structure. This means that often, people who have problems with digesting wheat can enjoy rye without issues, especially when it is baked into sourdough. This is what happened to my husband – when I met him 15 years ago he could not eat bread due to a wheat allergy, now he eats sourdough rye bread almost daily without any side-effects.

Can I grind my own flour?

Yes, most definitely, and your bread will be even more incredible if you do! When I started making rye breads I used shop-bought wholegrain rye flour. Some time into my journey, I invested in a Mockmill and I now grind all my wholegrain rye flour from rye berries minutes before I make bread. It is a beautiful process and enhances the flavour (and by enjoyment) of my breads greatly.

My sourdough starter isn’t strong, what can I do?

Keep working on it. There is a lot of information out there on creating sourdough starters and it can be overwhelming. My advice is to find one method/teacher and follow their method exclusively. If you would like my guidance you can read How to Create a Sourdough Starter, follow my visual guide on starters, access my pay-as-you-can video course How to Create and Maintain a Rye Sourdough Starter, and for $5, I have a comprehensive set of guidance in 10 Tips for Creating and Maintaining a Sourdough Starter over at The Fermentation School.

Do I need to refresh my starter the night before I make bread?

If you want your starter to be the most active it can be, it’s best to refresh it 12 hours before you make the pre-ferment. I’ve found that, my starter, after a decade of care, does not need this and I use sourdough starter straight from the fridge when making my pre-ferment.

I want to start now! Can I get your assistance in making wholegrain sourdough rye bread?

Yes. You can start by downloading my free 30-page guide, Baking with Ancient Grains, which includes a comprehensive recipe for sourdough rye bread. My podcast episode on rye sourdough bread will also help. You can have me guide you, virtually through the whole process in my course Rye Sourdough Bread: Mastering the Basics and if you’d like 1:1 time, there’s the option of Sourdough mentoring – I currently offer two packages, a get-going and a trouble-shooting.

To get your copy of The Beginner’s Guide to Wholegrain Rye Sourdough Bread enter you details below:

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Differences Between Bread-Making With Wheat And Rye

Ancestral Kitchen Podcast: Rye Sourdough Bread: Mastering the Basics

“I can’t eat wheat bread, it just doesn’t agree with me.”

How many times have you heard this? 

Maybe it’s you that struggles with ‘normal’ bread, or maybe your partner or friend. There are so many of us. Because, these days, it’s not just celiacs who have problems with wheat. Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is staggeringly-prevalent in our modern age.

And it can be devastating, because, seriously, bread rocks! It’s a huge part of our society’s food culture; it’s something we can share, keep, create a quick meal with and that can satisfy us at such a deep level. Good bread is the stuff of life.

If it’s you or one of your loved ones that can’t tolerate wheat and its gluten, don’t despair. Before you give up ever eating decent bread again and swear to go gluten-free, give rye sourdough bread a go.

Why rye sourdough bread is a good option

Rye gluten is not equal to wheat gluten

To start with rye is much lower in gluten; a recent study showed it as having three times less gluten than wheat. In addition to this, the gluten in rye has a different chemical composition to the gluten in wheat.

This is why rye breads do not rise in the same way that breads made with white wheat flour do. It’s gluten that helps trap the air inside a wheat bread. Rye flour just doesn’t have the same level of gluten as wheat flour, and the gluten that it does have doesn’t work in the same way. That means it also may not work in the same way in your body!

Sourdough changes the nutritional profile of bread

The long fermentation involved in the sourdough process breaks down many of the compounds in grains that can cause digestive issues as well as, at the same time, making many more nutrients available for us.

This means that when a slice of sourdough bread hits your digestion, it is literally not the same food as a bread made industrially with commercial yeast. Combine this with the lower and chemically-different gluten in rye and you’re looking at something that your body may just thank you for!

How to make rye sourdough bread in your kitchen

Along with struggling to digest wheat, many people find mastering the sourdough process tough. If you’ve struggled with a wheat sourdough starter or when making wheat sourdough bread, know that using rye is a lot simpler:

Rye: a fuss-free sourdough starter

Making and maintaining a rye sourdough starter is easier than keeping a starter made with wheat flour. Wholegrain rye flour is full of enzymes that encourage and support fermentation and the water-holding capabilities of rye means you can refresh your rye starter less often and give it less attention than it’s wheat counterpart.

No kneading or shaping required

This same ease holds true when it comes to making rye sourdough bread. Rye bread doesn’t need kneading or shaping like wheat does, so even if you’re a beginner at bread-making you’re in with a chance of getting a good result.

Take your pick!

Rye sourdough breads come in all shapes and sizes; they’ve been made by traditional cultures in rye growing regions around the world for centuries. There are dark, heavy breads, that’ll satisfy parts of you that you didn’t know existed. There are everyday sandwich-able ryes that’ll be feeding you all week. And there are deeply-scented spiced breads that’ll wow you with their fragrance and lasting flavour.

Here’s how to learn more:

Bringing rye sourdough bread into your kitchen and life needn’t be intimidating; here are two resources for you:

1/ Read my post How to Make Sourdough Rye Bread From Scratch, which includes access to my go-to recipe, the one I make in my own kitchen every week.

2/ Have a listen to my podcast episode dedicated to rye bread: Rye Sourdough Bread: Mastering The Basics.

One of the common criticisms I hear of ancestral eating is that it romanticises the past.

I am often chastised for idealising the food lives of our ancestors. People tell me that I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses, continuing with phrases such as, “these people were living in grinding poverty, struggling to find enough food to survive. Why would we want to go back to that?”

To which I respond, “I don’t want to go back to the past.”

Because, yes, I agree. Throughout history, people have lived with incredible shortage; life literally depending on whether food could be found that day. And even when our ancestors had enough food (which throughout the centuries they often did) they oriented their life around the getting and preparation of it, often working their bodies incredibly hard.

For those of us affluent and in the West, the opposite is true – we have an abundance of food and many time-saving devices that allow us to prepare meals using far fewer resources.

So, though I love spending time in my kitchen, I wouldn’t want to go back to the past and have us all dependent on the success of local harvests, working all day, every day to put meals on the table.

Despite not wanting to turn the clock back, I’ve dedicated the last 15 years of my life to learning about, practising and teaching the value of food as it used to be, before industrialisation. And the title that I have chosen for my work is Ancestral Kitchen – the word ‘ancestral’ in that phrase very much centering this way of life in the past.

So if I don’t want to turn the clock back, why am I promoting ancestral foodways?

Post-industrialised Food Systems

Since industrialisation, our food systems have been based around profit. Industry – created for and focused on profit – required a workforce who, when moved from their land into cities, needed to be fed. Our modern food world is shaped on this model and the companies that make our food do so because they can make a profit.

The replacement of local, home-based food systems with profit-based food has disconnected us from what happens to the soil and the environment when we grow food. It has polluted our world with the byproducts of industrial processes, incredible amounts of packaging and global transportation. And, on top of this, it has made us more ill than we’ve ever been.

We’ve dug up fossil fuels, made fertilisers and ploughed them into the soil. Our oceans are overflowing with plastic. Food-related diseases are skyrocketing. All for profit.

In addition, industrialisation of food has allowed us view what we eat as a dislocated ‘thing’, without tying it to the resources that are needed to make it. With this, it’s easy for us to ignore the damage that we are doing to ourselves, our soil, our planet and our fellow human beings.

Ancestral Foodways

The food systems of our ancestors were not connected to profit. They were concerned with providing as much nutrition as possible from what grew nearby, whilst also ensuring that the local environment was well looked after.

Our ancestors knew how to feed themselves in a sustainable way. Without big machinery, transportation and chemicals they had to eat what was around them, learn how eek out every bit of of nutrition from it and care for the soil so it would continue to sustain them and their families. Their foodways centred on respecting everything around them.

When looking at the problems our world is facing, the foodways of our ancestors make sense.

Why wouldn’t we want to give our bodies the best nutrition possible, enabling us to thrive?

Looking after the soil so that it can grow food for future generations is a no-brainer, surely?

Decreasing transportation, plastic and industrial pollution is something the sane are clamouring for. Why wouldn’t we do it?

And thanks to many of the things our modern world has given us we can do this without the hardship our ancestors took on; we can adopt an ancestral eating philosophy, without needing to spend all of our time, from dawn till dusk, focused on providing food.

How can we bring ancestral eating into a modern kitchens?

In modern kitchens, where we may no longer be growing or raising our foods we can be inspired by the ways of life that permeated our ancestors’ food systems and in doing so benefit ourselves, our families, our local economies, our soil and our environment.

• We can source our foods from local farmers.
• We can use the process of fermentation to increase nutrition and provide much-needed probiotics.
• We can eat all of the animal and diversify our diets, reducing waste.
• We can choose organic food because we realise the importance of maintaining soil health.

My article, ‘What does Eating Ancestrally Mean?’ explains the tenets of ancestral eating.

My article 5 Simple Ways to Start Cooking Ancestrally gives you practical and simple ways to begin.

And you can listen to my interview with Chris Smaje to understand why being inspired by pre-industrial farming systems is the key to providing food for our society going forward.

Sourdough bread as an example of ancestral wisdom

Let me give you an example of something I make regularly in my kitchen which directly draws from the wisdom of ancestral eating: Sourdough bread.

When I spend time preparing bread, I know that I’m standing in shoes of the generations of women who worked at breadmaking for many hours a week.

But I’m not doing it for the sake of recreating an long-lost domestic idyll. I’m making local-flour loaves because I know it to be the healthiest form of bread that I can provide.

By healthy, I mean nutritionally healthy – it’s fresh flour and has been rendered digestible by the sourdough process. I mean healthy for my community – the flour came from a local farmer. I mean healthy for my sanity – I’m better off prepping bread than I am scrolling or watching Netflix. I mean healthy for my environment – no pesticides were used in growing the grain, it wasn’t shipped from another country and it doesn’t need plastic packaging.

Taking Our Inspiration from the Past

Ancestral eating does not romanticise the past. Through learning how our ancestors lived and ate, we become even more aware just how difficult it was for many of them. And yet we know that they were incredibly resourceful at crafting food and farming techniques that support health and environment, and that industrialisation, with its focus on profit, has taken that away from us.

As an ancestral cook, I am inspired every day by the wisdom of the communities that came before me. And I believe that the more we can connect with that, the better outcomes there will be for us all individually, communally and societally.

If you’re cooking ancestrally and would benefit from the support of a community of like-minds, check out the Ancestral Kitchen Podcast community here.

In this post I will share how to roll your own oats at home, but first let’s talk about why you’d want to do it!

As conscious eaters, we often think about how the meat on our plate was raised or what condition the chickens who laid our breakfast eggs were kept in. But how often do we stop and consider what happened to the grains that accompany our meals before they got to our kitchens?

Most of the grains that we consume have had quite a journey before they’ve got to us. Following the story of oats gives us a good example.

How oats are processed in factories

Even if we buy oats whole, by that I mean as the oat grain (often called a groat), these grains, after harvest, will have been processed with heat and steam in a factory.

This processing stops the oats going rancid. The hulls of standard oats (as opposed to naked oats) are particularly difficult to remove and the oat grain often gets damaged during that removal. This damage exposes the fats in the grain to the air, which quickly results in rancidity.

But if you buy your oats pre-rolled, the processing hasn’t stopped there.

In order to roll an oat grain (a process that was invented by industrialists in the 1800s), even more machines are needed. This is because oats, when put through industrial rollers, will break up, creating a lot of dust. In order to avoid this, grains destined to be rolled oats are reprocessed in steam temperatures that go above 100C (212F). This gelatinises some of their starch meaning that the oats roll with less waste.

Thanks to the work of campaigners, most of us are aware that industrial food processing decreases the nutritional value of our food. This is true of oats.

Their first pass – to stop them from going rancid – does result in some nutrient loss. Manufacturers work hard to balance protecting the oat grains from rancidity and preserving their vitamins, minerals and enzymes but still, it happens. Yet frankly, I’ll take that; because without it those oats wouldn’t make it to my kitchen in a healthy state, let alone my table.

The second pass that oats go through – to make them into rolled oats – results in even more nutrient loss. This subsequent round of heat and steam is not necessary. We can roll our own oats at home, from the oat grain, and capture those nutrients for us and our family.

3 Good Reason to Roll Your Own Oats

As you can see reason number one to roll your own oats is to get more nutrients:

1 – Higher nutrient content

If you roll your oats at home just before you cook with them, your resulting dish will be much higher in nutrients. For example, lab tests have shown that:

• Vitamin B3 content is 71% higher in home-rolled oats compared to shop-bought rolled oats.
• Vitamin B6 content is 900% higher in home-rolled oats compared to shop-bought rolled oats.
• The enzyme lipase has eight times as much activity in home-rolled oats compared to shop bought oats.

2 – Much More Flavour

If you roll your oats at home, they’ll be tastier – so much tastier than industrially rolled oats. They are fresher and more nutrient dense, so no wonder they taste better! I find them to be sweeter, more toasty and generally more satisfying.

3 – Economy

If you roll your oats home, they can be cheaper. When purchasing whole grains, you can buy and store large quantities (in a way the that you wouldn’t want to with pre-rolled, processed oats). This enables you to utilise substantial bulk discounts to save money.

How to Roll Oats At Home:

In order to roll your own oats freshly at home you will need:

• Whole oat grains (often called groats): These can be purchased in small amounts from your local health food store or in large quantities from a mill or bulk food supplier.
• A grain flaker: There are more of these on the market than most people realise! Here’s a few that I, or people I know, have experience with:

Mockmill Flake Lovers

The Mockmill Flake Lover is a tabletop electric flaker. You feed the oat grains in the top and rolled oats come out the bottom (at a speed of 100g per minute – which is less than two minutes for two bowls of oatmeal).

The pros of this flaker are that it’s counter-top, relatively quick and requires no manual input from you other than feeding the oats into the hopper (which holds 200g of oat groats at anyone time).

To buy the Mockmill Flake Lovers in the US click here.

To buy the Mockmill Flake Lovers in the UK click here.

If you use one of the above links, you’ll be supporting my work. Thank you!

Mockmill Flaker Attachment for the KitchenAid

This was designed for the KitchenAid but can also be used on other food processors. You attach it to the processor and it can mill one cup of oat flakes a minute which will give you three to four servings of oatmeal. (The hopper at the top holds three and half cups of oat groats.)

To buy the Mockmill Flaker Attachment for the KitchenAid in the US click here.

To buy the Mockmill Flaker Attachment for the KitchenAid in the UK click here.

If you use one of the above links, you’ll be supporting my work (without paying any extra). Thank you!

Marcato Marga

The Marcato Marga is handcranked roller mill. I’ve had one for over five years and it’s made many, many batches of home rolled oats.

The upsides of it compared to the Mockmill Flake Lover is that it’s quiet, doesn’t require electricity and has rollers that you can adjust manually to alter the thickness of the flake. This adjustment facility means the mill is great for preparing the oats necessary for making the Scottish oat ferment, Sowans.

The downsides of it compared to the Mockmill Flake Lover are that it needs manual processing – requiring 20 to 25 minutes of hands-on time to produce a kilogram (two pounds) of oat flakes; and, unless you purchase the attachable motor, all of that time the mill is powered by your arm!

There are other flakers is available. Komo, Mockmill’s competitor produce roller mills and Eschenfelder also make a range of flakers.

Rolling at home is not just about oats!

Whichever one you choose, remember that it’s not just oats that you can flake! Wheat, rye, barley, einkorn, emmer and spelt can all be flaked too. Choosing one of these machines not only means getting more nutrition from your morning oats but also gives you endless creative opportunities!

Graph and Mockmill photos courtesy of Mockmill. Other photos from my kitchen!

Get three traditional British oat recipes in my Heritage Oat Collection. Enter your details below and I’ll send it to your inbox.

Looking back over what I wrote, I’m astounded: it’s an incredible amount of work!

Yet this is a fraction of what women did in the home just a few hundred years ago. Yes, there was ale, a lot of ale, but there was also making bread, dairying, looking after children, cleaning, tending to the garden and animals, ensuring everyone was clothed and much more.

And in pre-industrial households, it’s not as if the men didn’t work! Partnerships were very practical, both sexes depending on each other to subsist. Some tasks were generally undertaken by women (because of their physicality or nature), some by men.

The household was a unit of economic value. Society lived by that value.

That all changed with industrialisation.

At that moment, we began to outsource women’s and men’s household work. That outsourcing was mainly organised by men who started doing it ‘more efficiently’ and for a profit. House-holders then had to travel outside the home to work.

No more preparing breads with the best available ingredients, no more home-brewed ale, no more keeping animals, no more drinking fresh milk.

Fast forward a couple of hundred years and we now have mass-produced, foreign-flour bread with a list of additives as long as our arms, packaged in plastic (that ends up in our fish) and transported across countries in polluting lorries.

Instead of home-made ale we have homogeneous beers. We have wines made of grapes whose natural yeasts are killed before being inoculated with lab grown cultures. We have global brands of sugar-filled soft drinks.

And the Western world is full of disconnected, dissatisfied people with ever-decreasing health. I know that you know it’s not a coincidence.

And yet in our world at large, women who decide not to ‘work’, to instead stay at home and care for their children, tend a garden and make meals from fresh ingredients are lost members of society, literally deemed (until very recently in the US at least) unemployed because they don’t make an economic contribution.

I am thankful that there are women and men out there who are shouting as loud as they can about the value of home-making and I want to add to their call.

What can I do?

How can I amplify my voice and the voices of so many women, like me, who know the value of this work and want the world to realise what it’s ignoring, what it’s devaluing, what we’ve lost?

These are questions I ask myself every day.

As well as moving back to the UK this summer, my husband Rob and I have decided to home-school our son, Gabriel. One of the biggest factors in this decision has been how much we value the work that we both do in our home. We want to pass these important skills onto our son.

Yes, we want him to know how to read and write and yes, we want him to know that he can pursue the things that light him up, but we also want him to know what it takes to run a household sanely and healthily.

We don’t have a daughter; we’ll be passing what society deems women’s work on to our son. Because there’s a bigger issue here than how work was, is or should be divided between women and men. Taking responsibility for all the facets of personal and societal health within the home is important and society has devalued and pushed it away for too long. We want it to flow through the veins of our child notwithstanding his gender.

So that, as well as being able to turn his hand to making traditional ale at home, he will also know how to how to bake proper bread, how to feed himself well, how to work with the ingredients around him, and how to provide for himself.

In order to turn around the numerous problems our modern Western society has, we must begin to value again the life-giving, holistic work that has been carried out by women and men for thousands of years inside the four walls of the home.

p.s. If you’d like to have a go at the ale, I’m enthusiastically behind you. There’s an ale and brewing thread on the podcast patreon forum (you can join here for just $5 a month) where I can provide additional support and guidance.

Peter Grieg worked for his father’s farm and shop business and saw the factory farm model brought from the US to the UK, by his father, post-WWII; and he watched it evolve into the beast it has become today. He never felt right raising animals under the oppressive, unhealthy conditions that the factory farm requires, and his development of Pipers Farm and the multi-farm network it involves today has been a many-decades long de-evolution, back to the older traditional methods of animal husbandry, community network, and local butchery.

Abby is the co-author of Pipers Farm Sustainable Meat Cookbook: Recipes and Wisdom for Considered Carnivores. She is the one we talk to here in this episode. Abby’s thoughts are profound and distinct and she shares them here in vibrant clarity with the background and the farm experience to match. How is meat to be ethically handled, how does waste factor into all of this, why are consumers so key to sustainable farms, and even what are some details we can use in the kitchen to improve our meat preparation!

Patrons of the pod will find a selection of recipes from the cookbook in their Treasure Trove ready to download today, and we will talk about a few more in the episode here. Patrons can also check their private podcast feed to enjoy a short bonus aftershow with Abby where we went just a little deeper and more informally into some of what we covered on the show. So much about our food system can be depressing and dismal, Abby will leave us inspired by the beauty that is possible and the strength of choice that each one of us has.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The organ supplements we use and trust – get a 5% discount (and free shipping) on grass-fed supplements, including liver capsules by visiting: https://www.oneearthhealth.com/AncestralKitchen

Resources:

Get your own copy of the book in the podcast bookshop:

In the US here

In the UK here

Pipers Farm on the web

Pipers Farm on Instagram

Do you want to get the most you can from your bread, in terms of both taste and health?

Do you worry that the pre-ground flour that you are using is losing its nutritional power and potentially going rancid as its being stored?

Have you thought about grinding your own grains, but not yet made the leap?

After a decade of baking sourdough bread (and teaching sourdough baking), I finally decided to purchase an electric stone mill earlier this year. Many podcast listeners have asked what I got and why. This post answers those questions and will inform you as to what to look for and how to choose a mill.

Why get a mill?

Taste

I adore everything about real sourdough bread and made bread using pre-ground flour for almost a decade. But when I tasted those same breads made with freshly-ground grains, I was blown away! The flavour is incomparable.

Economy

It is generally cheaper to buy non-ground, whole grains (which you can do in bulk) than buying flour. Yes, the initial purchase of your mill to grind them is an outlay, but it is actually an investment because over time it will save you money.

Health

Once a grain is milled, many of the constituents of it, now exposed to oxygen, begin to degrade. This means not only a loss of life-giving enzymes but also results in the oils that were in the grain going rancid.

Weston A. Price, when visiting traditional communities that relied on grains for a large part of their diet saw how important it was that those grains were freshly ground, and his remedial programs to improve health decline in his patients he always used freshly ground, wholegrain flour.

Our ancestors, with their traditional food wisdom, used grains freshly ground. It is only since industrialisation and the move from countryside to towns that there’s been a need for pre-ground flour.

Connection

The closer we get to the source of our food the more whole we feel. Grinding whole grains on your counter just before you make bread brings a whole new dimension to this!

Knowing all the above and baking bread for myself and my family several times a week, I still hesitated in getting an electric stone mill. It was the cost of the initial purchase that deterred me. Then, as part of the work for my forthcoming book on oats, I stumbled across two things:

1. A study on the consequences of feeding rats freshly-ground flour versus shop-bought flour. “After four generations, only the rats fed fresh stone-ground flour and those fed the bread made with it maintained their fertility.” (1) This study literally blew me away! Once I read it, I knew I had to get a grain mill.
2. Research revealing that phytic acid can not be neutralised in oats without using freshly-ground flour (see my article here for the information).

What mill did I buy and why?

I wanted an electric stone mill (as opposed to a roller or impact mill). Grains have been ground by stones for centuries and milling this way helps keep the temperature of your resulting flour as low as possible as well as preserving the nutrients in the grain.

I wanted it to be easy to maintain, reliable and not too big. I also wanted it to look pleasant!

Aside from these things my main concern was cost. I was a little daunted – there are a lot of stone mills on the market some of which can cost close to $1000!

I had seen the German-made Mockmill on videos put out by my friend and colleague Elly, of Elly’s Everyday. I knew they were simple to use and clean and that she loved them, so I headed to their site to take a look.

Mockmill have a selection of stone mills at various price points – check them out in the US and Europe here and in the UK here. Some are housed in a vegetable plastic made from wood fibre that would otherwise go to waste, some are set in a wooden surround.

I noted the detail of the mills I saw there and then compared the features and cost with other brands of stone mills.

I chose the Mockmill 100 for my kitchen. Here’s why:

• It’s affordable
• It has a 6-year guarantee
• It is simple to use and easy to maintain
• It looks nice on my counter
• It has an easily adjustable sliding scale for the coarseness/fineness of flour – which means I can grind both extremely fine spelt and rye flour for breads but also make coarse oatmeal for oatcakes or porridge.

The results?

In one word: Fantastic!

The flavour of the bread that I’m making with freshly ground grains is astounding. I just cannot believe how much more depth of flavour there is (I wish I could give you a taste test!)

I love looking at the mill on my counter. My kitchen is extremely small and I usually swap out equipment regularly, storing most of it in cupboard in another room. But the Mockmill has found its own place permanently on my cozy workspace.

The connection that I have to the bread that I’m making has deepened. It feels amazing to take whole grains out of my supply, grind them freshly and make bread for my family.

It’s so easy! I switch it on, pour the grains in and then catch the flour. The Mockmill 100 grinds 100g (c. 4oz) of grain every minute (other Mockmill models do it more quickly). It takes around six or seven minutes for me to grind grain for the loaves I make, that’s quick enough for me! Once the flour is ground I just switch off the machine and forget about it until next time.

I’m no longer worrying about storing flour. I used to buy flour in bulk, decant it into smaller packages and pack my tiny freezer with it. Now I buy grains in bulk and have stopped worrying about flour going rancid.

If you are thinking of getting a grain mill, I cannot recommend Mockmill highly enough. If you would like to purchase one you can, at the same time, support the work that I do here and with Ancestral Kitchen Podcast. The mill won’t cost you any more this way, but I’ll receive a small commission. Here’s what to do:

From the US:

Go to the Mockmill homepage by clicking here.

View the mills in the Mockmill USA shop

View the Mockmill I bought in the USA shop

(note added February 2025: Mockmill are currently experiencing supply issues and are out of stock of a lot of their mills. You can still order one; your order will be placed in a queue and the mill delivered to you as soon as it is available)

From the UK:

Go to the Deliver Deli Mockmill shop by clicking here.

View the Mockmill I bought in the Deliver Deli Mockmill shop here.

From the EU:

Go to the Mockmill shop by clicking here and use code P2024-AK-03 at checkout to get a 3% discount.

From the rest of the world:

Go to the Mockmill shop by clicking here and use code P2024-AK-03 at checkout to get a 3% discount.

I hope to get suppliers that are more local to Australians and Canadians soon. 

References:

1: Bernasek referenced here

Wholegrain sourdough baking with ancient grains doesn’t have to be complicated. Let me guide you:

Tailored 1:1 mentoring that will help you overcome issues and succeed with home-made wholegrain ancient grain sourdough.

A note on us getting together: This mentoring is available Mondays 10.30am-12.30pm, Thursdays 4.00pm-6.00pm and Saturdays 2.00pm-5.30pm (all London time, use a time zone converter to check the equivalent in your time zone). If you cannot do these hours, email me at alison@ancestralkitchen.com before purchasing letting me know your needs, and I will do my best to accommodate you.