Baking sourdough bread for the soup of the day : the obsessive quest

This post is not about the iPad or the cup of tea or the china ware or the bowl of soup. This post is about the bread.

The soughdough bread.

A good  lunch is made a great lunch.

Sourdough starter is made with a small amount of old dough saved from a prior batch, and is sometimes called mother dough orchef. This small amount of old-dough starter contains the culture, and its weight is increased by additions of new dough and mixing or kneading followed by rest or leavening periods. A small amount of the resulting dough is then saved to use as old-dough starter for the next batch. As long as this starter culture is fed flour and water weekly....Sourdough bread is made by combining the increased amount of starter with another new-dough addition, along with any other desired ingredients to make the final dough. ... This final dough may be divided and shaped, then is allowed to rise, and is followed by baking.

It is not uncommon for a baker's starter dough to have years of history, from many hundreds of previous batches. As a result, each bakery's sourdough has a distinct taste. The combination of starter processes, refreshment ratios and rest times, culture and air temperature, humidity, and elevation also makes each batch of sourdough different.

My best recipe so far

My leaven is a wet mix made up from around 150 ml (my reserve starter volume which I keep refrigerated) to one litre and kept in the refrigerator overnight and for a part of the next day.All I do is add water and flour to the starter  along with a teaspoon of Diastatic Malt  and mix it up. We're talking at least 12 hours of allowing the yeast to get going. It becomes effervescent and sweet  smelling and looks like porridge.

I then scoop most of that mix (I keep about 150 ml in reserve for next time) into 1 kilogram of flour mixed with salt (a teaspoon plus) and another teaspoon of Diastatic Malt. I blend this with 700 ml of water. at for now about 3 tablespoons of olive oil ( not essential but I love the taste).  I used to use 500 ml of water but find I get the bread I'm after -- a Ciabatta  style loaf -- by using a very wet dough. I knead this dough by also folding it a lot as Ciabatta, being so wet, is traditionally folded. It's like wrapping a Christmas present.

I raise the dough for at least another 12 hours (in my oven but with the heat off) , divide it into baking tins  and bake at 250 degrees Celsius  for 30 minutes, remove the bread from the tins and bake for another 15 minutes or until I am happy with the crust and hollowness of the sound I get when I tap the crust. When I remember I place a small bowl of water in the oven when I bake the bread. 

Is this the best sourdough baking process? I know of sourdough bakers who approach  their baking with even more complex methods than this and I can understand the obsessiveness of the quest. 

It's like creating Adam out of clay. Gumby for eating. It's alive!

I am God. Adore me. Eat my bread. And He gave it to his apostles saying ,"take thee and eat,for this is my bread."

Dietary note: I find that if I keep to a procedure like this I create loaves that are lower in carbohydrate content (and no doubt with a lower Glycemic Index)  -- but still have enough gluten flex in them to rise well -- than if I deployed a faster baking process. You get warned about 'exhausting' the yeast but I find I can run these long rising times successfully perhaps because I start with such a small proportion of starter culture and utilize an initial rising by relying on refrigeration. If you are diabetic, reducing the carbohydrate content and raising the acidity is a dietary plus. The suggestion is that the yeasts pre-digest the dough before you get your choppers on it. [I can  test these elements by taking blood sugar readings 2 hours after consuming the bread.]

Bread, cheese, and kisses: baking sourdough

I bake bread 2-3 times each week. It's a routine. It may be a domestic chore but it is also a glorious quest. You can do a lot with flour and water.

if you add home sourdough

and salt

and a squish of olive oil

When and how you do all this, in what amounts, and in conjunction with what  mixing and kneading activity will determine the qualities of  your final loaf.

Here in Australia you need to add Diastatic Malt to local flours if you are going to use sourdough for the yeasting. The rest is up to you...

And being up to me, this week I baked the sort of loaf I've always aspired to.

I'm chasing a Ciabatta style  loaf but one that is higher and more easily sliced vertically. Ciabatta is chewy with a  ready penchant to be holey with a firm crust. It's the sort of bread, in my estimation, that improves with age.  Handmade, well made, three day old Ciabatta should be  delicious and can be eaten without accompaniment -- like  butter.

Such is the bread I baked three days ago (pictured above).

I am on a winner.

Bread like this takes time to create.

1. I feed my sourdough starter and allow it to enliven and rise overnight  -- at least 12 hours -- in the refrigerator.
2. I then mix the sourdough with more flour, water, salt and a little olive oil before kneading it. The feel and texture of the dough, its elasticity, is the main skill with kneading. You need to stretch the gluten out and play with it. Tease it.
3. I let the dough rise for a good part of a day. (Contrary to what some of my peers have suggested I do not exhaust the yeast by deploying this long rise.)
4. I  then bake the loaves at very  high temperatures to encourage rise and bounce in an oven with a bowl of water  placed on its floor before reducing the temperature so that the crust will firm up. I bake for at least 45 minutes...I say 'at least' because I always check the loaf for its drum like hollow sound. That decides when the loaf is ready.

When you are working with a wet dough -- and Ciabatta requires a wet dough  -- you need to ensure that you don't end up with a loaf that is too moist. So you can't make it too wet or bake it so that the rising is still squelchy. There's a skill involved. The end result depends not only on your mix and your knead, but also how you navigate the oven temperature and time...and your oven's quirks.

I'd like to be definitive and specify quantities and times exactly but beside spoiling some of the fun and personal challenge involved,  there are so many variables en route to the final baked loaf that it is hard to make a ruling.

While I may sound a tad obsessive -- but I do like to cook -- my passion for sourdough is also foundered on the wonderful attribute that what I bake and later eat does not impact greatly on my blood sugar levels. I can eat this stuff without a major spike in my carbohydrate issues.

Other breads -- commercial breads, alternative whole grain breads -- will  cause my blood sugar level to rise sharply by  1-2 mmol. With this stuff I bake  I'm more in control.

Even when it's made from white flour, sourdough bread has a relatively mild effect on blood sugar compared to other white breads and even whole grain breads.The acid in sourdough slows the emptying of the stomach, thereby slowing the delivery of glucose to the bloodstream.This anti-glycemic effect can last through to the next meal, slowing the emptying of the stomach even a few hours later.Researchers in Sweden   noted that the fermentation process that’s involved in the creation of sourdough utilizes carbohydrates, lowering the carbohydrate level in the dough as it’s transformed to lactic acid. 

Lose weight. Ask me how.

I come from a long line of breeders

of Toby Jugs.

If it wasn't for a bit of the old growth hormone kicking in, I'd be short and stubby with shoulders for a neck.

Thanks dad.

My family lineage does obesity to a treat when it sets its mind/belly to it.

I was doing OK  for ever so long, then, as my chronic illness became more chronic and middle age descended upon my metabolism, I started laying down the padding. If I take the year I fell ill as a marker, I've put on a kilogram per year extra   for each of the past 25 years.

It's not that I'm sedentary. Twenty five years ago my exercise quotient was rather intense and had been for several years up  until then: swimming, cycling, running and hiking. Despite my tragic malady I maintained a focus on physical exertion mainly to overcome stiffness  and pain but I had to negotiate a new threshold, a new handicap which meant that I could never attain athleticism as a lifestyle.

But the irony is that no matter how much I upped my investment in exercise 

--if you follow this blog you'll know that I do indeed do a lot of physical stuff--

the weight didn't shift at all.I may be ill but I'm more active that most people I know.I box. Lift weights. Walk. Kickbike. We even put in a pool and I would work out in it 10 months each year, wearing a wet suit so I could maintain my exercise regime during Winter.

This is serious stuff and I am always focused and reasonably disciplined in my pursuit despite the fact that I'm so often bedridden or house bound.

But still...I gained weight. 

BMI

It was  only this week when I weighed myself on a public weighing machine that it struck me that I am within reach of my recommended  Body Mass Index. I should attain  that preferred BMI sometime around Christmas this year.

So if I am now  losing weight, what's changed? Do I have a cancer?

At present I am losing on average 1.6 kgms per month. That's why I can project onto a Christmas timetable. I need time to slim down. But I am confident that my physiology will perform to schedule.

How is that happening?  It's so darn simple that it is staggering: I'm eating less carbohydrate. Generally I try to keep my carb intake to around 100-130 grams per day.  This is a sort of Diabetic Diet -- and that's why I'm on it .

I can eat anything just so long as I'm aware how much carbohydrate is loaded into it . In effect that means I cut back on rise, pasta,  cereals , fruits....I try to keep the carb intake per item/serve to under 16-20 grams. If you do your sums, and consider that only so may items are carbohydrate  dense, you can fit a lot of stuff in your mouth for 130 grams per day.

This approach more or less means that I cut out breakfast cereals and don't partake of rise, pasta, potatoes and the like for my evening meal. I still eat bread -- I bake with my own sourdough -- as I eat  one to two slices per day. I still drink beer -- I brew my own with low GI sugar -- without any consequence that I can register. I'm fortunately not a sweet tooth and can live without cake.

...and I'm still losing weight.

I'm not hungry. I eat a lot of wonderful stuff. I partake of the fat universe without guilt.

..and I'm the lighter for it.

Getting the weight down

When I recently changed my diet  , my intention was to reduce the insulin stress in order to control  my diabetes symptoms. I knew, of course, that I had to also loose weight.

The irony is that I am indeed losing weight faster and more consistently than I have ever managed before.

While  I hope I can  assume I don't have  cancer (!) , the irony is that without seriously trying to lose weight, I am!

I've always had a reasonably good diet and for years have adhered to a low GI -- Glycemic Index  ruled -- diet. I have also always exercised despite, and because of, my crippling Fibromyalgia.

But still the weight staid on and always crept up. I could not move it.

However research published this week indicates where my problem may lie:

The study published online shows people with a family history of type-2 diabetes gain more weight more quickly than people without the genetic pre-disposition and their insulin response is different as well.

Such findings suggests why my difficulties prevailed... But the fact is I have lost significant weight -- 8 kgm in 8 weeks -- despite the fact that I was not primarily geared to weight lost. The change has occurred by  following a simple rule of thumb: I have reduced my carbohydrate intake to below 100 grams per day.

While my protein and meat intake has gone up -- as well as my fat consumption -- I have also increased  the amount of vegetables I eat each day.

So now I eat:

• low carb vegetables
• no legumes (no chickpeas or beans) 
• no pasta, rice, potatoes or corn
• the only fruits I allow myself are cantaloupes and berries like raspberries and strawberries.
• much more cheese, eggs and (Greek) yogurt than I consumed before
• handfuls of nuts: peanuts, almonds, macadamians....
• 1-2 slices of home made sourdough bread each day or every other day (I don't eat either pasta or other baked breads or pastries)
• 650 mls of home brewed bitter beer (ie:a pale ale) made on low GI sugar (and I drink the beer most days  each week)
• no milk except in my tea

Since I am aware of the carb content of what I put in my mouth I can mix and match as I choose and ' what I lose on the swings I gain on the slides...'

This diet is neither strictly high protein fetishized (like the Atkins Diet) nor as obsessively diabetic (and conservative) as my local patronising nutritionist plugs for. Nor is it  Paleothic/Primal.. The fact is it's customized within certain parameters: the key one being to get carb intake down to below 100 gram per day (more or less). 

That I am consuming more fat, eating much less overall, not suffering from pangs of hunger...and am losing weight! amazes me.

En route I had a few days of acute diarrhea and abdominal cramps which I put down to a massive shift in the ecology of my gut flora as the daily carb fix entered drought mode and with protest and brutish savagery, my intestinal flora  evolved and a few species died off.

But as they say: no pain/no gain (or is it 'loss'?)

Afterthought:
I estimate that I averaged 1 kilogram of weight gain for each year of (fibro) illness. Using such  an estimation I've just taken back/rolled back 8 years!

The business of baking sourdough bread

Sourdough bread that you bake yourself ruins your capacity to unconditionally eat most other breadstuff.

I currently use a three stage rise method. That may seem a complicated to-do but once routine sets in, it's a habit.

1. I take my yeast creature -- my starter  -- from the refrigerator usually on a evening. Just imagine some flour mud -- as it's a living mix of air born yeasts, flour and water,  10 months old (I'm looking forward to growing old with it). And having separated out 1.25 kilograms of bakers flour I increase the starter's volume by adding flour and whey to the jar it lives in. You don't have to use whey but I have whey left over from yogurt making and whey is very much a food resource . Waste not whey / want not.
   
   

   Researchers at Lund University in Sweden discovered that whey appears to stimulate insulin release. Writing in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,^[6] they also discovered that whey supplements can help regulate and reduce spikes in blood sugar levels among people with type 2 diabetes by increasing insulin secretion....Commercial whey protein shakes are often consumed after workouts by people who are trying to gain muscle mass.

   The whey also enriches the biochemistry of the starter and  encourages the lactobacillus culture.
2. I let the mix yeast up in the refrigerator over night. The following morning I add more flour and whey (or flour and water) to the starter and leave it for another few hours in the fridge.I guess I should point out that I  add diastatic malt to my flours as is it unlocks the potential of Australian white flours.Also salt, of course. For my working volumes -- 1.25 kgm -- I add 2 teaspoons of diastatic malt.
3. After the second feed -- and yes I guess it's like breast feeding a baby -- I mix the starter flour blend with the remaining flour and knead it into dough. To do this I need to add more water or whey if I have any in reserve.as a rule of thumb,  I add 500 mls of water to the mix to get a soft dough.I then leave the dough to rise -- usually in the oven as there are no draughts within and I have the option of turning the oven light on if I want to increase the ambient temperature. If my dough mix was, in my opinion, too stiff or dry (and adding extra water during  a working knead is not a good idea) I  place a bowl of boiled water at the bottom of the oven to increase humidity. I let the dough rise for at least another 4 hours.
4. By this time  I am 24 hours into the business of making the bread but the only hard work was kneading the dough (and cleaning up the mess! ). I can skip the second feed if I want to shortcut the process, but starters need to be spoiled and feed teased to give their scrumptious all.
5. I bake at my highest oven temperature for 30 minutes. I then turn the loaves out of their bread baking trays, reduce oven temp  to 200 C and bake the bread for another 20 minutes. I like the crust slightly charred and exploded.

Note:Whey and sourdough
if you have any whey (and I'm not talking whey 'protein' supplement powders)it's useful as a means to increase the sourness of sourdough thus reducing the potential impact consumption of the bread will have on your meal's GI response. Think about the synergistic contribution of yogurt in that regard. And souring the bread more can be a gastronomical  preference. Whey is also an active ingredient in many traditional sourdoughs as it enriches the culture medium. Whey gives the bread a firm, crisp, but shallow, crust -- almost like a skin that is chewy in its own right.

Making the most of dietary taboos

Due to my brand  new pathological  sentence -- (sotto voce: of Diabetes II )-- I have been changing my diet.

I guess this is a drastic change, so drastic that when I tour a fast food section at a shopping centre I am overwhelmed by the sheer volume of food I am now disallowing myself. Maybe 76-75  percent of what we are asked to put in our mouths in these eateries is based on wheat, rice, corn or potatoes.

If you want a taste of 'civilisation' -- that's it on the end of your fork.

Since I have gone feral --  trying to eschew such fare -- I'm slashing my carbohydrate intake while allowing myself a couple of daily indulgences, being such essential fruits of civilisation that make me even more civilised and without which life would be unbearable.

Thus my diet has changed and rather than let my gastronomy suffer too much from my denials I am trying to update my cuisine choices with as much culinary flare as I can muster.

My quest has nonetheless been exciting for all that. Necessity afterall,  is the mother of consumption.

So I'm learning a few tricks about eating  low carbohydrate  on the food chain:

• Greek Yogurt: I luv yogurt and as Count Otto von  Bismarck said about bayonets, you can do anything with yogurt except sit on it.  The plethora of fruit flavoured yogurts available in any supermarket obscures the utility of this fermented milk. You can drink it, blend it, make sauces from it (like Tzatziki) , build a curry from it, mix it with either sweet or savory foods and indulge yourself in a massive array of national cuisines from the Mediterranean basin to India. And when you start making your own yogurt as I have -- you get to experience yogurt, like Little Miss Muppet did , as a choice of curds and whey.
• Sourdough Bread: And talking about whey...what better home for the sour semi clear liquid extracted from the curdling of fermented milk, than in your Sourdough starter. Your happy kitchen yeasts at work. Sourdough bread tends to have a lower Glycemic Index than other breads -- because of the amount of digestion underway and the Sourdough's acidity -- so it ain't quite a simple wheat loaf. It's biology at work making whoopee. The carbohydrate is there still but with sourdough on your side you can get your GI down below 60 and your carbs to maybe under 12 grams per serve. ( Compared to a standard loaf of GI >70 and Carbohydrate >15 gams).
• Spanish Food: Many cuisines I am familiar with come from true peasant stock and build their sustenance around a good serving of high density carbs.In Asia it is rice. In Northern Europe, potatoes. In the Middle East, various wheat forms. In Italy, pasta... But the Spanish, aside from rice dishes like paella, don't seem to be obsessed with merging grains with meal dishes. Wheat, in the form of bread (and excellent hard wheat bread at that), is something you ate with a meal, it wasn't in the meal. This tendency has promoted a cooking style where mixes of meat and vegetables are standalone, low carbohydrate courses where many creative flavourings have merged. You also get a selective Arab/Middle Eastern influence -- the Moro style -- which is not held hostage to a pork taboo. And Spanish pork is fantastic fare. So if you are thinking low carb options -- think Spain -- because Spanish tucker offers options, especially in regard to celebrating vegetables.
• Sausage: I've always been a dedicated mince meat man. It goes with almost anything. You can stuff with it, roll it, pat it down, slosh it with sauces, stir fry it, bake or fricassée. And it is (or once was ) cheap! I tended to stay away from tackling  the ubiquitous 'meat ball' because it's often a challenge to get the 'ball' to stay together without binding. But when you take your meat; grind it up; mix it with spices and what have you -- then extrude it into a casing-- all these issues are passe. The humble sausage ticks a lot of boxes. Unfortunately sausages sold at supermarkets and most butchers may be over 25% fill  with the fill being grain based. But when you make em at home -- what gets encased in the casing, is a world for you to win. The very wide world of the sausage is at your fingertips.
• Camembert : Not the only soft cheese but check its properties. For diabetics, cheese is in and for those that may balk at some of the fat content of hard cheeses a little bit of Camembert -- and Australia has world class Camembert (and some great Parmesan style cheeses) -- is  low carb indulgence.

Thus my shift is in motion. The belly is moving. I still have a few issues with cream -- I take that in my  morning coffee instead of milk -- but I take milk in my tea. Can't give that up.

No one's perfect.

Driving down those blood sugar readings by going low carb

View large format graph

It may not be self evident from the above graph but I've been trying to drive down my blood sugar readings by reducing my daily carbohydrate intake. This is only less than two weeks of such activity but the results are impressive.

Not only am I losing weight much faster than before I began this regime, but I feel extraordinarily  physiologically different: my skin has become more supple and less oily, my breath is no longer tastey, my mouth feels sweeter, my sinuses are less phlegmy...and I won't mention my little boys room visits.

These changes have proceeded as I roll down my daily carbohydrate intake to  -- at the last few days -- less than 100 grams. I'm doing that despite the fact I am still consuming 650 ml of home brew beer and 1-2 slices of sourdough bread each day. The beer maybe carries 17  grams of carbohydrate and the bread , around 15-18 grams.

But no pasta, rice, potatoes and other high GI fill. No pastry of course. I've switched to a few low carb fruits such as berries -(and pass t on the rest) - and indulge my passion for nuts. I didn't plan to but I'm staying away from legumes as they weigh in at around 15 grams per serve. I still eat yogurt but I'm rolling back the milk volume I consume ( 250 ml = maybe around 16 gram carbohydrate) especially as milk is a glucose booster. However, I get to indulge in cheese -- especially my favorite, Camembert -- as cheese a has low carbs.

 I amuse my gastronomy by grazing a mix of meats, eggs and vegetables in various forms of presentation.

I also get to  chew a lot. Imagine a grazing cow chomping away. Yep ,I do spend more time eating.

The graph above plots my blood glucose readings (blue) and my carbohydrate intake (red). I'm currently testing my blood on waking and two hours after each meal. These readings are going down but how far down I can take them is a moot point. In consideration is how far my diabetes has progressed already and how much of an impact greater weight loss and more exercise will have on my biochemistry. But the research is very affirmative in this regard (see these discussions) and I will surely make further gains up to a point.

I haven't set any goals in way of blood glucose yet as the figures aren't conclusive and I think there are more lifestyle variables I have to address.But after being somewhat morbid  initially, I'm very much more up beat as I feel I have some measure of control over my condition..

The dead hand of the father: diabetes

I've been working myself up for the past two weeks as I've been  dealing with a new sentence:" You have diabetes!"

I have been "pre-diabetic" for -- as much as any one knows -- 2 years, but I  fear the spate of ill health and torrid Summer strains has tipped me more  toward more pathology.

The context is that my father was diabetic -- never looked after himself; was overweight +++ ;on insulin injections; and died under a massive coronary  on a Gold Coast bus 25 years ago at 70 years of age. There's enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that his mother was probably diabetic too, but undiagnosed.

The family curse appears  to be Diabetes mellitus type 2-- fortunately -- rather than the insulin dependent variety ( my father moved onto insulin injections because he did nothing to arrest the disease's insidious consequences). This legacy has been at the back of my mind for some time and since I took my father as a antithesis model I thought I was ahead of the beast: overweight but not morbidly so, always exercised, very considerate of my diet, etc.

I'd been following a Low Glycemic index diet for several years and thought that I was ticking all the right boxes. That I have had Fibromylagia for the past 25 years meant that  my health picture was always going to be complicated by its pervasive physiological presence. But despite that , within the limits of my illness , I always pushed the envelope in regard to activity and exercise.

Amitriptyline's double edged sword

What  crippled my aspiration was my obvious failure to lose weight. -- once i'd gained it.

For many years I had been taking various low doses of Amitriptyline.

Normally prescribed as an antidepressant, it is also used in conditions like Fibromyalgia as an analgesic. In fact it is the only intervention I've found that has had any impact on the severity of my condition.

Among the many side effects of Amitriptyline what do we find?

• amitriptyline may raise or lower blood  sugar!
• amitriptyline may promote weight gain (in fact many Fibro sufferers who stop using it give up the drug because of this one side effect)
• taking moderate to high daily doses of antidepressants for more than 2  years is associated with an 84% increased risk for diabetes, according  to a large observational study.

So you can guess what my first act was: getting off amitriptyline.  I nonetheless delighted in a few hallucinations as I slowly rolled back the dose.


Now "clean", so to speak, what's my plan as I gotta have a plan, right?


The plan


Even before the recent news I had done my homework. So i did more, so much more that this has become an obsession these last few weeks as I try to get a handle on an approach that can help me survive (in the manner I am accustomed).


This isn't so easy as the standard advice for diabetics is contrary and confusing. In fact, diabetes treatment and diet is a hot potato. At issue it seems to me -- and I had been treated accordingly by my doctor (before I dropped him and got another) -- was a preferred arrogance that doctor knows best and all Davy has to do is take the tablets and do a bit of this and that in way of lifestyle and diet.


So much for 'diabetic education'. 


Fortunately I now attend a Indigenous Health Clinic and since diabetes is a plague among Aborigines and Torress Strait islanders -- among all Indigenous peoples world wide in fact -- you get treated very differently. While I feel extremely privileged to share this service as I'm a Migloo as Celtic as they come --

Migloo:An Aboriginal word describing not only a white  person, but a white person who is interested in Aboriginal culture. It  originates from the Mayi-Kutuna language of the Leichhardt River area of north Queensland where it meant ‘a person’. It has now been adopted  nationally by Australian Aboriginals. In Aboriginal folklore, the migloo was the great white hunting whale of the ocean, hence the term being  used to describe white people.

my medical situation raises a few questions that may have a lot to do with my 'treatment'.

Diabetic Democracy

The first resource you get access to is a blood testing kit. This tool is a liberator because it empowers you to fiddle with your food intake in order to drive down your blood glucose readings. The daily pricks makes diabetes management democratic. No power is ever gained, you see, without shedding blood.

Unfortunately in this case it has to be your own.

But then when I began to consider what may be the constituent of my everyday consumption that blows out my  blood glucose readings, something that the Glycemic Index folk do not  address directly , I was struck by the self evident fact that carbohydrates are the problem. It's not about "good" (low GI) or 'bad' (high GI) carbohydrates so much as too much carbohydrate per se.

GI is only part of the story and it deceived me.

So now, and researches and daily experiments proceed, I'm trying to reduce the amount of carbohydrate I consume in any given day. An average diet with bread, pasta or rice  maybe notches up a consumption of over 300 grams of carbohydrate per day -- in fact grains feed most of humanity as it is from them that we get most of our caloric intake. I'm aiming for a reduced intake of 70-150grams per day. This puts me in the chomping cuisine sphere of the Atkins Diet and the Paleo diet aficionados.

The modern dietary regimen known as the Paleolithic diet (abbreviated paleo diet or paleodiet), also popularly referred to as the caveman diet, Stone Age diet and hunter-gatherer diet, is a nutritional  plan  based on the presumed ancient diet of wild plants and animals that  various human species habitually consumed during the Paleolithic—a  period of about 2.5 million years duration that ended around 10,000  years ago with the development of agriculture.

Faddish? That's what I would have said until I started doing the background reading. The documentation is impressive despite the fact that such diets seem to be so ideological. Nonetheless, there is a group of diabetic researchers -- especially the endocrinologist Richard K. Bernstein -- who have clocked up the glucose inhibiting miles and come out with the same sort of recommendations.

So with my lancet in my hand and merrily  prick prick pricking I've been going aggressively  low carb for the past two weeks. It's too early to summarize the glucose figures, or settle upon a trend,  but despite my increased fat consumption my weight is falling.

I am turning into hunter gather man.

There are quite a few issues raised by this shift that I'd like to explore in later posts -- especially environmental and human history  ones -- but for now I'm seeing how much of the grain lifestyle I can hang onto, especially sourdough bread and home brewed beer. Among  Paleo adherents there are some considered pragmatists who don't see it so  much  a loin cloth lifestyle change that is absolutely exclusive of everything post-Paleolithic. The real point of the dietary exercise is the impact what you put in your mouth, and don't put in your mouth,  has on you.

And today the doc was supposed to tell me where my treatment was at but he didn't show. I thought I'd get a forbidding  sentence but instead I get a window of opportunity to  exploit diabetic democracy for another week or so.

Living well by doing it at home: Pa amb tomàquet , café con leche and English bitter beers

Travel does broaden the mind.  Among my many discoveries of a European sojourn last year were the following culinary delights:

• The coffee culture of Barcelona with its everyday morning hit of café con leche (coffee with milk)
• The durum wheat rich breads of Barcelona that make Pa amb tomàquet possible
• The traditional English bitter  beers of the United kingdom.

Once back home I took up the challenge of adapting  these cultural markers to the everyday  rhythm and swamp flow of downtown Northgate

café con leche


Replicating the morning hit of coffee with milk  required  the addition of a new hardware item, the iconic coffee percolator.  I'm only usually a coffee drinker when out and about, as I prefer tea -- Madura either black leaf or green tea -- at home. But that hit of coffee in the earliest AM possible required not only the purchase of an outstanding example  of 20th Century design and the frequent hunt for a good bean, but the morning performance of a ritual that volume and taste dictate cannot be varied.

That's all -- just a morning coffee, leaving the rest of the day's fluid intake for tea. Ceremonial. Cherished. Absolutely the only way a day can begin.

Pa amb tomàquet

I learned early from my experiments with squishing tomato that the local bread available here in Australia did not lend itself to Pa amb tomàquet squashology. No stranger to bread baking, I decided that to get the quality and style of bread I wanted -- since purchasing handmade breads was an expensive indulgence -- maybe required home baking. So after creating my own sourdough starter I've more or less been baking our own bread every second day for the past so many months.

It's a routine.

I feed the sourdough yeast and leave it in the refrigerator over night. I then mix the leaven with more flour and rise it for about 4 hours before baking. Works every time. As well as a general addiction to the sourdough loaves and their ready marriage with a squashed tomato, I'm loving sourdough bread with a few slices of Camembert.

And Australian Camenbert is excellent esp Tasmanian Heritage Camembert
which in 2008 won best camembert in the world at international competition.

Simple. Delicious --  in fact 'heavenly' -- on both counts.

Much as I'd like to throw on a slice of Spanish Ham (Jamón Ibérico) I can't afford it.-- but I can grow my own tomatoes as I do in Garden Noir


Traditional English Bitter

While a dedicated tippler my usual  consumption habit had been a blend of wine , fruit juice and green tea mixed into a sort of Sangria with ice. My last major beer foray was several years back when I brewed my own version of Irish Stout -- home brewing being cheaper and, at the time , tastier than purchasing take home Guinness.

But this time around,in the wake of Europa,  I alighted on a cheap bottled bitter -- Tasman Bitter , brewed for Coles/Myer by James Boags in Launceston. I like it for its bitter taste  and kept buying it as I could not locate a bitter to match it at the major outlets. After some months sucking on this beer I was a bit concerned about the demand beer outlay was making on the family  budget, so I again got myself a Home Brew kit -- and Coopers kits are  great value -- and soon enough was brewing my own bitter: Coopers Traditional English Bitter .

This is  great drop although a bit sharper and a touch more abrasive than the bitters I remember from Ol Blighty. Unfortunately despite the fact that Coopers is distributed through supermarkets and Target and KMart -- supplies of this brew kit are unreliable in my neighborhood.

Local specialty brew barns have a nasty habit of being selective in what they carry and it can be frustrating trying to locate a specific  kit even from these suppliers on a drop in basis.

So after reviewing my options on the web I made a few surprized discoveries.

According to review resources such as www.hbkitreviews.com Coopers India Pale Ale (IPA)  is one of the best  beer kits in the country and rated more highly as a true English bitter than  Coopers generic bitter. But if you really want to tap  the source, Muntons ( and English brew kit maker) Yorkshire Bitter is on par with Coopers in the top brew kits available here.(I used to employ Muntons to make my stouts.)

So all I had to do was secure myself a ready supply of said five star kits. to satiate my perceived need for a glass of English bitter. Not so easy unless you use the web and purchase online.

I'm now using the Sydney based Brew Shop.

So that's what I do. Guaranteed supply. Delivery costs on par with the challenge of local travel to get to an outlet on the off chance they may have what you want. Two day delivery.Maybe all up one quarter to one third the price of buying readymade beers which inevitably don't taste as good.

So as I approach the anniversary of my Grand Tour I can report that  I'm gastronomically catching up on the fruits of my journey.

Bon appetit!

Baking Bread from Sourdough and Spelt Flour

Spelt is a remarkable grain.I've baked bread with it previously and since I  got my hands on over a kilogram of it yesterday  I baked  some sourdough bread from it tonight (pictured above).

Maybe I rushed my proving because I was pushed for time, but the results are scrumptious with a strong sour taste off setting Spelt's nutty, almost Moorish, flavours. It looks like I  may have to shift to Spelt in a big way so long as I can get a cheap source of regular supply.

We've made a major shift here at home and while I bake bread every two days, that means we eat all of what I bake -- down to the last crumb -- in forty eight hours. So here bread is indeed the stuff of life -- breakfast, lunch and tea; toasted or sandwiched. Three loaves in two days regular as clock work.

The problem  now being that it is very hard to go back to eating other breads which I find flavourless, lacking any noticeable texture and often just seem like packaging or wrapping for the stuff that's laid on top.

So my new quest is to make the most of a marriage between sourdough and Spelt. This means that I have to learn the willy ways of Spelt -- a very different flour than what comes from wheat. And because its still a rare flour (see below), Spelt is at least twice the price of wheat per kilogram.So maybe wheat/spelt mix is the way to go?

I've included some notes on Spelt below -- taken from Basic Ingredients who used to have a warehouse just across the railway tracks from me here in Northgate where I could get all manner of flours and bread making stuff.-- including Spelt Flour. But a year ago they moved.

The history and origins of spelt are somewhat confused and complex. There is evidence that Spelt was cultivated by ancient civilizations both in Europe and the Middle East thousands of years ago. It is mentioned in the Old Testament and in various Roman texts. Carbonated grains of spelt have been found throughout Europe including Britain, in many Stone Age excavations. Its popularity remained widespread, especially in Eastern Europe, until the end of the 19th century. German records of one region, dated 1850, showed that 94 percent of the cereal acreage was producing spelt and only 5 percent producing bread wheat.


The rapid fall from favour of spelt was mirrored by rapid developments in modern farming. Once combined harvesters were introduced which could harvest common bread wheat in a single process it would have no longer been so attractive for farmers to continue to grow spelt. This is because each individual grain of spelt, unlike common wheat, is covered by a tough outer husk which requires removal in a further process before the grain can be milled into flour.


Fortunately spelt was not entirely lost to mankind and in the mid 1980's it was rediscovered in Europe and has undergone a major resurgence in many parts of the world ever since. However for this to happen, special machinary which could dehull individual spelt grains in commercial quantities needed to be introduced into the chain of production for making flour. By this stage it was realised by those taking the lead in this renaissance that the time and cost of having to do this was outweighed by the advantages to both farmers and consumers of resurrecting this ancient grain.
Spelt in Australia


The Australian spelt story started in 1988 after a farming couple from NSW heard about the revival of the spelt crop in Europe. The idea of growing spelt in Australia interested them so they obtained seeds from a European seed bank. The spelt turned out to be relatively easy to grow here and after four years of harvesting with a pair of scissors they were able to build up a seed stock. Eventually their crop became a commercial reality when, after building their own special machine for dehulling the grain, they began milling it into flour for sale to wholesalers and bakers.


Environmental Benefits of Growing Spelt


Spelt is a relatively low yielding crop so doesn't take as much from the soil as more modern crops. It is therefore a more sustainable crop on a long term basis. Being low yielding it also thrives without the application of fertilisers even on relatively poor soils. Spelt is also very resistant to frosts and other extreme weather conditions and the grain's exceptionally thick husk protects it from pollutants and insects during its growth and storage, prior to milling.


As spelt is a pure, original grain and not biologically modified in any way it is very resistant to the crop diseases that often plague modern crop varieties and grows quite successfully without the application of herbicides, pesticides or fungicides.


Harvested Spelt is stored with the husk intact so it remains fresher over a much longer period than other grains. It has been claimed that spelt's hull is so strong that it can protect the grain from virtually every type of pollutant.

Taming the beast in the yeast -- Sourdough Ciabattas are go.

After a lot of experimentation on my part and some considered research, I have finally settled upon a working protocol -- aka recipe -- for the baking of my preferred  breadstuff.

The  recipe begins:" 1. Capture your yeast..." My yeast was whatever was floating about my kitchen one Sunday a few months back. So my yeast has an address.Let's call it Northgate feral.

Yeasts also take a while to settle into a routine of bread making so my first few bake ups were challenged by a certain infantilism on the part of my domesticated spores. Now that they know who's boss and matured through use--  being put upon to raise dough to order every second day -- I can now say that I have tamed the beast in the yeast.

My yeast and I will  henceforth cohabit for years. It's like a new member of the family  -- except you don't have to take it for walks or change its nappies.

So to make my bread I mix 1 kgm of (supermarket bought) Wallaby Bakers flour with  4 teaspoons  of  Diastatic malt (because Australian flowers need this addition if you are raising with sour dough.) I then combine 2 cups of the flour with 2 cups of water and the sourdough starter -- a  very wet dough portion left over from my previous batch. I leave that to yeast up over night in a screw top glass jar (which is the sough dough's home -- a yeast kennel).

Laucke Wallaby Flour is a flour with characteristics that have been tailored to provide doughs that are capable of successfully meeting a wide range of Bakery requirements. Doughs produced are of good water absorption and balanced; being strong, extensible, and tolerant. Wallaby flour is used universally in the bakehouse and patisserie for yeast raised products such as standard white bread, bread rolls and most pastries, and specialist products such as pizza, hearth and flat breads, bagels and croissants. It is also used for most heavy fruit cakes, cream puffs, yeast donuts, buns and in fact for any product which requires a well balanced and tolerant dough. 

I then combine the remaining flour with one and half teaspoons of salt  and 2 tablespoons of olive oil Then mix it all with the sourdough that has been left to yeast up over night. As I  empty the jar of sour dough starter  into the flour I make sure there is enough remaining in the jar for my next bake . I return that portion  to the fridge.

I add 450 ml of water; mix the lot and knead, adding flour as I stretch and knock down the dough.. I prefer a wet mix with a high water component so that I can obtain a crisper ciabatta  crust.

After allowing the dough to rise for a further 4-5 hours I portion it into three bread trays and bake at my oven's highest temperature for 15 minutes with a bowl of water on the  oven floor. I then drop the temp to 200 C for a further 30 minutes and turn  the loaves out of their trays  to crisp up in the oven for another 10 minutes.

In bread baking lore -- especially with sourdough -- there are any number of ritualistic variations you can pursue.so long as you balance the quest to deepen the sourdough flavours with the risk of exhausting the yeast.

Pictured above: my latest bake.

Sourdough, funny tummies and the Glycemic Index.

After spending time in Catalonia and Scandinavia this year I bought back home with me, among many other memories, a delight in the crusty baguettes  of Barcelona and the massive array of whole grain and rye breads in Oslo and Avica (  a village just across the Norwegian border in Sweden).

After that -- I became a bit of a bread snob and nothing I can track down here could match my overseas experiences. Even at those boutique bakeries that will charge you maybe a hefty  $6  or more for a loaf  of bread came any where near my baked bread experiences in Europe.

So , no stranger to bread baking, I started  up the routine of baking bread  on a regular basis. However, since I was keen to keep to a Glycemic Index regime, the complication with eating bread (many breads will register a GI of around  100) is that it has a high GI  and to efollow a GI diet (the diet that is now recommended for diabetics) means you want to eat foods that are low GI.

Going  sour

The irony is that sourdough bread -- even white  flour sourdough bread -- has registered consistently   with a low GI (ie: under 60). The Glycemic Index has Sourdough Rye bread rated at  48 and Sourdough Wheat bread at 54. This means that the Carbohydrates  in sourdough  bread  break down slowly  during digestion, releasing glucose gradually  into the bloodstream.

When I started back baking bread I took these figures to heart and created my own 'sour dough' starter  in place of using commercial bread baking  yeast.

 Sour dough starter

I won't go through all the challenges this may present to bread baking -- especially in Australia where our flours are amylase-deficient. (Amylase = the enzyme that breaks down starches) To make up for this failing, which does not impact on the rising of   yeasted breads, you need to add a trace of diastatic malt  to Australian  flours.

Anyway, by trial and error and a few online forums -- I've been baking sourdough breads every two days or so for the last few months. The bread is fantastic to eat, and we consume every last crumb.I doubt that I can go back to eating 'normal' breads ever again. This is a very different experience of taste and crumb.

If you know your GI chomp law, you'll also know that 'sour' foods -- those that are acidic , like yogurts and vinegars and sourdough breads -- if consumed as part of a meal will  reduce the GI value of the whole meal! That's synergy for you:You can eat high GI foods but in combination with the sour flavoured dishes on the menu, these other food's GI ratings will be bought down

So I'm happy as a pig in  wheat field.

Gluten Intolerance

But there's still more to the story of sourdough and that concerns gluten intolerance. As it so happened, while I'm baking up a storm my daughter was diagnosed with Coeliac disease . Coeliac disease is caused by a reaction to gliadin, a prolamin (gluten protein) found in wheat, and similar proteins found in the crops of the tribe Triticeae (which includes other cultivars such as barley and rye). It's a gross inconvenience to be Gluten intolerant as so many foods in the Western Diet have wheat in them.

So if you are gluten intolerant it's no hamburgers, batter, biscuits, pasta, cakes...or bread for you..

However, it also turns out that , as recent research indicates  breads raised with sourdough reduced the gluten content in the flour by massive degree: In one study of sourdough fermented breads:

All fermentation batches (that is, everything but the yeast bread) reduced the gluten significantly. The second through fifth batches reduced the gluten by 73%, 83%, 93%, and 98% respectively. However, the final group, using the L. sanfranciscensis and both enzymes, reduced the gluten drastically -- from the yeast bread’s nearly 75,000 parts per million (ppm) to a miniscule 12 ppm, well below the threshold making it safe for those with celiac disease. With carefully-selected lactic acid bacteria and two enzymes, the team created a 100% wheat bread safe for people with celiac disease to eat.

This research was specific to one strain of sourdough so it's not conclusive across the (bread) board. Sourdough is first made by captured wild yeast in  the air ( such as the air in my kitchen) and growing them in a culture medium -- water and flour. So the constituents of one person's or place's sourdough will differ from another's.

It should also be pointed out that , while I do, many sourdough bakers don't rise their bread for 24 hours and the research method  allowed for a day long rise so that the sourdough could work on the proteins in the flour.(It should also be pointed out that if you  educe all gluten, your bread won't rise.)

But when you begin to consider further the  challenge this research presents  you begin to question a few assumptions that underpin our standard reading  of what made  "Western Civilisation" happen.   Wheat made "Western Civilisation" happen. The Fertile Crescent in Asia Minor -- our real "Garden of Eden" -- was a wheat field. And we've been growing and eating it --and changing our societies so we can grow and eat it -- ever since.

Grain made us what we are today. In Asia it was rice. In the Americas it was corn. In Europe it was... wheat.

But all wheats aren't the same. Therein hangs a great history tale which is related in this excellent essay by Katherine Czapp --The Case for Rejecting or Respecting the Staff of Life

I'll leave it to you to study the piece. However, while there are many types of wheat,which when milled create flours with different attributes   there is also industrial processes that have , especially under capitalism,. Czapp writes:

With the advent of the Industrial Age, parts of the world destined to become the wealthiest empires--such as Great Britain and the United States--eventually gained reputations as nations that produced the worst bread. One could lament about it, joke about it, rage about it. . . but not much could be done about it, and certainly not on a scale necessary to provide excellent bread (or other foods, for that matter) to every citizen. But that, of course, is the point. The industrial scale is not the human scale, the scale of the artisan baker, cheesemaker or small farmer. The wealthy nations attracted many laborers from the countryside at home, and from towns and cities abroad, all wanting relief from poverty and various other serious privations. For better or worse, the people needed to be fed, and the fact that their bread was insipid, their milk watered, did not strike officials as a matter of first importance. 

While we now assume that our commercially available bread is not adulterated, we nonetheless are being fed a product that is a long way from past modes of preparation:

Mechanized bread production lines have evolved over time to include three main dough mixing variations. The first is the continuous mixing method, introduced in the 1950s. By the mid 1970s, this rapid production method accounted for 60 percent of all commercial bread produced in the United States. With this process, all ingredients are added at the beginning of a cycle and the slurry of flour and yeast and "improvers" travels via conveyors without pause to the oven. Any proofing (rising) occurs there. An early television commercial for WonderBread highlighted the fact that it was made from a batter, not from dough, "so there are no holes in the bread!" Bread made in the continuous mixing method more resembles cake in texture, with a soft texture and no fermentation flavor or aroma. This method has generally become much less popular today because of the drab quality of the final product and because of income lost during breakdown periods when entire batches had to be discarded if repairs took longer than 20 minutes.
A serious change in bread-making techniques occurred in 1961 when the Flour Milling and Baking Research Association at Chorleywood, Hertfordshire came up with a method to speed up production of raised bread for industrial manufacture. Called the Chorleywood Bread Process (CBP), the method depends on high-speed mixers and chemical oxidants along with solid vegetable fat, lots of commercial yeast and water, which produces a loaf of bread from flour to sliced-and-packaged form in about three and one-half hours. Low-protein soft wheat grown at home in Britain can be used in this high-energy input method, dispensing with the expense of importing high-protein bread wheats from abroad. 

And the story gets even worse. But I'll leave you to read it. Czapp argues  that the modern  industrial method of producing bread -- with yeasted rising over and done within a twice -- could contribute to the now pandemic incidences of Coeliac disease.

But I guess, the jury  has yet to rule on the details....