Toad-in-the-Hole is an English dish that combines the gloriousness that is sausages with the deliciousness of a crispy, bready surrounding. It is filling and comforting. I love it. Traditionally, it is made with a white flour batter. Being a Toad-in-the-Hole … Read More
The crust. Is it the best bit? Or is it the place where the juicy topping meets the dough? Or maybe the crispy bottom?!
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All of those places on the wholegrain spelt sourdough pizza I make are gooood.
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What’s your favourite bit?
Fermented barley and rye cakes baked in cabbage leaves. These are an #anccestralfood version of a recipe in the Russian cookbook ‘Beyond the North Wind’. I soaked the flours in #rawgoatmilk kefir overnight and then added in some melted ghee. Baked in a very hot oven, the cabbage crisps and the cakes are creamy and gorgeous.
This is my fermenting millet – a blended mix of hulled and unhulled grains that I soaked and sprouted – readying itself for its journey into oven-baked millet cakes.
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Those bubbles have been growing over the last 24+ hours. I love bubbles – they seem the sign of such hope to me.
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I’ve written a couple of articles for my website the last few days. There’s my formula for sauerkraut and another article titled ‘5 simple steps to start cooking ancestrally’. If you use the ‘What’s Cooking’ menu at www.ancestralkitchen.com and scroll down, you’ll find them.
Have you ever cooked with wholegrain (i.e. brown) millet? I didn’t even know you could buy it with the hulls on until I saw it at a healthfood store here in Italy. I got very excited and promptly bought two packets! .
Researching told me it’s most often used in Asian cuisine to make dumplings, but it does have a history here in Italy, where millet, often brown, as flour was added to bread mixes.
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I love fermenting grains and got exploring. This is what I came up with. Here you see the two grains about to be soaked. I do this for at least a day as the brown millet is hard. Then I drain and rinse and leave to sprout. The tiny tails on the little grains as so cute! Then I food process for a long time with a little starter and leave for another day or two to ferment. It takes on a cheesey funk that is gorgeous. Then I either make porridge with it or bake it into cakes.
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I’ll snap some pics the next day or two to show you the outcome.
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Can you buy it in your part of the world? Have you used it? What do you do? I’d love to meet another brown millet fermenting geek 🙂
Breakfast is the one meal we don’t usually eat together as a family. Both my hubby and I practise intermittent fasting: I go from 6pm until 10am not eating and he does 6pm till 11.30am. There’s no way my little boy can do that, so he usually eats earlier. Habits are good to break and Sundays we usually have a ‘special’ breakfast together.
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Today it was fermented spelt porridge. I soaked the spelt berries for 24 hours with some whey, then let them sprout. When they had tails, I blended them with a little more whey. I then left them overnight to ferment. We cooked them up with this morning. My hubby added goat kefir, apple and soaked/dehydrated walnuts. My son had banana, miso (yes, I know, with banana – he’s bonkers :-)) and cashews. I had ground flax seed, walnuts, miso and a spoon of peanut butter. We all added copious coconut oil.
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Eating together, consciously, makes the start of a special day even specialer. Easter love to everyone who got (and didn’t get!) this far into my ramblings!
