What’s cooking?

The fussiest loaf I’ve ever made, but boy, it’s worth it.
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Let me sing its praises:
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With spelt as the main grain, it’s nutty and easier on the tummy than wheat. The ‘porridge’ part (I used sorghum for this, but you could use another grain) makes the crumb soft and helps the bread last. The chocolate barley adds a beautiful colour and bursts of dark, smokey, rich flavour and the hazelnuts give crunch and extra fragrance.
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My recipe, which you can find by clicking the link in my profile, will let you know what to expect and walk you through every step.
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It’s not difficult. I promise. You could make it. And then eat it 🙂

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Sourdough Spelt Sausage Plait.
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We were going to make pizza. And then I decided, after spending a large part of the morning recording a podcast episode with @farmandhearth that I didn’t have it in me. So a quick change and I was making sausage plait for the first time in, I think, decades!
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It’s simple filling that just involves mixing herbs, onion and squeezed out sausages. And it worked really well wrapped inside the dough intended for pizza! Where sausage met dough on the inside that magic soaking-up/going-a-bit-soggy happened.
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Check my story today (I’ll save it to the highlight ‘recipes’) for the details.

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I have spent hours trying to find nixtamilised corn (also known as ‘masa’) in Italy with no success. There’s corn everywhere here (think polenta) but no one appears to cook it as the original users (mesoamericans) did – with pickling lime – to increase the availability of amino acids and release the niacin.
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That’s a little suprising to me, considering the devastating problems the Italian region of Veneto had with the niacin-deficiency disease, Pellagra, not so long ago (there’s a great episode of the podcast Gola about it, if you’re interested).
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So, true to my usual form, I’ve decided to try and make masa myself. I’ve got myself some corn kernals and tracked down pickling lime. When it arrives, I expect to make a mess!
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Once the masa is made, I can bring to life an authentic fermented corn cacao atole – one of the ways cocoa beans were originally, and deliciously, drunk.
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In the meantime, I can’t stop experimenting, so I tried with ‘normal’ Italian polenta. I soured it for 2 days with a blob of my bread starter. I then cooked it up and added some of my home-roasted, ground cacao seeds. This breakfast was the result, which I then topped with ground linseed and melted ghee.

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A rosemary focaccia risen with the wild yeast power of rosemary, raisins and apple!
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This is the bread I made with my botanical water. It rose beautifully, with lots of holes. The 100% spelt crumb was so soft. And it tasted of rosemary…or more accurately, it felt like I was inhaling rosemary as I ate. Perhaps the pockets of air inside held the perfume through the bake?
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Thank you @morgancarsandbread – success!
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I’m hoping to do more of these yeast water loaves with my growing herb collection.
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Lots of bread in my stories today.
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Am I making you hungry?!

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In two and a half years of sourdough baking this has never happened to me….until today!
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This is my botanical water starter – that is a starter created by using a yeast water that I ‘grew’ from rosemary, raisins and a little apple (you can see a pic of the ferment a few posts back). I wasn’t expecting it to be so enthusiastic!
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So to make this into a bread. It smells *amazing*, so strongly of rosemary, and I’m excited to see what flavour it imparts to the foccacia I’m planning.
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Thanks to @morgancarsandbread who runs @cinnamonsquare for his ‘Naturally Fermented Bread’ book that inspired me to give this new method a go.

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My favourite breakfast: Sourdough Spelt Pancakes.
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I mix up the batter for these the night before and add a blob of sourdough starter. In the morning, I often add in things I find in the fridge – in this case it was some sweet potato that I grated.
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The cast iron pan (along with some ghee) does a sterling job of cooking and crisping.
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Then my favourite thing to do is spread on miso and generously sprinkle ground linseed. That’s what you can see here.
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All Italian (even the miso!) and all delicious.
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There are instructions for the pancakes in my bio if you need further encouragement!

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Sausage n Mash, right? Nope. Sausage n Sowans!
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Whoever worked out that tasty, fatty bangers are great laid on smooth creamy cushions was spot on.
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But we rarely have white potato. Here, instead of mash, I’ve served our local @valledelsasso sausages on a bed of the Scottish traditional oat ferment, Sowans. The fat of the sausage helps compliment the slightly acidic ferment flavour of the oats.
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I surrounded the whole thing with roast onion and cardi (cardoons). The cardoons were too bitter for my son (he usually eats everthing!) but I managed some 🙂
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Check out my story today to see Sowans (and a ton of other ferments) in progress.

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Spent beer mash sourdough topped with home-cured bacon from pigs cared for up the road and raw Italian provolone.
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This was *such* a treat.

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What if eating real food didn’t have to be prohibitively expensive? The most nutritious, real, nourishing foods have traditionally been the cheapest and simplest – conversely, the expensive, rich meals of the wealthy were often laborious productions involving sweets and refined foods.

It’s time to take back our ancestral wisdom and reclaim foods and skills that once belonged to the people, and have now been relegated to super-expensive and elite grocery stores at staggering prices.

In this episode, Andrea and I discuss five of the most expensive “healthy” foods you can buy – which also happen to be five of the cheapest foods you can make at home!

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