What’s cooking?

Crusts: Love them or hate them?
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I’m in the love camp. A fresh crust from a just-baked loaf is heaven for me but an end-of-the-loaf crust is still a treat.
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Here’s a sourdough spelt loaf with a oat porridge stirred into the dough. I claimed the crust and topped it with home-rendered lard, scrambled egg and a lot of parsley.
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If you are the bread-maker, never feel guilty for nabbing the crust 😉

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There’s been an ancient beer lull here. My grains stopped sprouting. No sprouting means no malt and no malt means no beer. Rob’s been pining for it, so I had to do something!
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Step in @molinobongiovanni who sell organic grains. I bought (from top left, clockwise) farro spelta (spelt), avena (oats), miglio (millet) and segale (rye). a little bit of each has gone in to soak, and then hopefully to sprout!
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In the meantime, I’m heading off on a beer starter culture adventure. So far, I’ve been following @sandorkraut’s Bouza recipe in #wilfermentation, which uses a sourdough starter. The sourness in the resultant beer is sometimes overpowering and I’m ready to spread my wings and try another way of inoculating my ferment that’s yeast-led, rather than bacteria-led. Will report back on how it goes!
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Luckily, Rob likes *almost* everything I create. On a good day, I think it’s because it’s generally tasty. On a not so good day, I’m sure it’s because he loves me 😉

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Still working on the sourdough non-dairy muffins!
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This latest batch – chocolate and hazelnut – went to be ‘taste-tested’ by the 12 little ones that make up my 7 year-old son’s class! Reports back were that they were great…but Mumma’s not totally satisfied by the recipe.
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I tried to make the outside less crust-like by steaming the oven. It worked well, but overall they are still a bit ‘bready’ for my liking; I want them more ‘muffiny’ – think that translates to softer.
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Next round will include fruit pulp.
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I shared the recipe in my newsletter that went out yesterday. If you want to receive it, click the link in my profile. If you do so before end of tomorrow, you should automatically get send this issue and therefore the recipe.
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You could be eating these very soon 😉

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The beginnings of a fermented gingerbread about to go down for a 2-plus month fermentation. And I couldn’t be more excited!
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I mixed this dough up alongside @elliemarkovitch (using Zoom, across an ocean!). She did hers with rye whereas here I used local spelt flour along with chestnut honey from @thecreatorscastle.
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Thanks to Annie at @kitchencounterculture for the nudge. I’d been researching long-fermented flour recipes for a while, having gone down a rabbit hole when I heard that Pain d’Epices was originally fermented for 3 months. When I saw her posting about a @sandorkraut inspired fermented gingerbread, I knew I had to get doing it.
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This dough is now on the bottom shelf of a cupboard downstairs in my apartment. Our flat is on a hill, cut into the Tuscan soil, so it tends to stay the coolest down there.
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Will I be able to resist getting it out and checking/sniffing it between now and December? Probably not. But that’s half the fun, isn’t it?!
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Some pics of the process in my stories.

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I’ve known they were coming for a while, yet still, as we rounded the corner to the local farmers’ market last night, my heart skipped a beat upon seeing the chestnut lady setting up stall!
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I knew we only had 30 Euros in our pockets. And I knew that had to cover all our veg needs, yet, like a kid at Christmas, I really wanted to get some nuts to roast and some flour to bake with!
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Rob dug into every pocket he had looking for change whilst I tried to work out exactly *just* how many what greens we needed for the week.
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Down to the last few cents, we managed it, coming home with not only lots of kale and broccoli, but also a bag of marroni (think chestnuts but bigger) flour and a couple of handfuls of the nuts to score and roast in the oven.
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These nuts are from a region of Tuscany called Mugello, which Wikipedia tells me is the heart of Tuscan chestnuts. I feed so grateful that it’s here on my doorstep and that there are people who are willing to take it upon themselves to steward and nurture the land and its produce.
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I’m on to making some Castagnaccio with this flour. It’s an age-old Tuscan chestnut cake. I’ll be demoing it and talking all about chestnuts in the live Zoom cook-up @farmandhearth and I are doing for our podcast patrons on November 12th. If you’re interested, go to @ancestralkitchenpodcast to check out how to become a patron and join us.

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Putting a little oats into a sourdough does something magical to the crust. It gets a little thicker and a little crunchier. This makes it even harder to resist slicing fresh from the oven. Look at it…could you?!!
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This is a sourdough spelt with leftover porridge added to the dough. There are a lot of bread recipes on my site. Click through from my profile if you want to have a go.

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Biome-enhancing biotics aren’t just about the well-known *pro*biotics. Listen in to today’s podcast episode to hear all about the whole range of biotics, including prebiotics, probiotics, paraprobiotics and postbiotics.
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Andrea and I give practical examples of how we include all of these in our day, we talk about whether we think completely ‘healing’ a biome is possible, we share the latest research on dead probiotics and we talk about how to get started with the good bugs!
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The podcast is on your app as @ancestralkitchenpodcast or you can stream the episodes from my site; the link is in my profile.

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There’s a story I sometimes forget to share. But it inspires every thing I do in the kitchen. Thank you @timelesscookery for prompting me to talk through it.
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The fourth link in my profile is to a video I recorded last week.
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In it, you’ll hear about:
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– my 140lkb (65kg) weight loss
– restoring my menstrual cycle naturally, after 5 years with no periods
– turning to the raw milk weston price baby formula after not being able to breast-feed and being threatened with child protection for doing so
– my son’s life-saving bowel operation
– the journey to heal him, post-op and how that’s healed me too.
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There are some clips of the interview in my story.

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