An Old Perspective on Sugar

They lurk around the corner of every cubicle. Glossy, fluorescent, just waiting to ambush the unsuspecting breakfast-skipper: boxed cakes, doughnuts, cookies, candies and pastries, frosted inside and out. They tower at the entrances to supermarkets, intercepting shoppers just before the produce aisle. Nary a Sunday morning passes that I don’t see small children double-fisting doughnuts or frosted cookies during the church fellowship hour.

Sugar is the angel and the devil on all our shoulders. So sweet, but is it really bad for you? Not surprisingly, the Sugar Association says no. Others implicate sugar in every malady from hyperactivity to heart disease.

At its most innocuous, refined sugar provides empty calories. Consuming too many “stripped” calories leads to deficiencies, weight gain, or both. In nature, plant sugars grow together with the proteins, vitamins and minerals we need to metabolize them. Lacking these partners, refined sugars draw nutrients from our bones and teeth for their digestion.

Even if nothing else were true about sugar – allegations about obesity, diabetes, immunosuppression, cancer – the specter of nutritional deficiency is reason enough for me to cut back on the sweet stuff. To get an idea of how far, I look to history.

Our desire for sweetness is inborn and natural. We learn it at our mother’s breast; the sweetness (and fat) of breast milk is deeply associated with comfort and love. After we’re weaned, our sweet tooth guides us to the ripest (most nutritious) fruits and vegetables and protects us from poisonous and spoiled foods.

For all but the last fifty years of human experience, sugar was not available in the abundance it is today. It was prescribed as a medicine in some cultures, used as money in others, and in all cases rare and precious. In the amounts and forms naturally available, sugar was a harmless treat.

Sweetness, then, is something to be treasured. It occurs rarely in nature and often at great expense of energy, which should guide how much we eat now. If we had to gather our own honey, maple sap or sugar cane, how much less would we consume? In light of the effort it took, how much more would we value it?

Modern technology has short-circuited sugar’s natural rarity. The average American consumes up to thirty times as much sugar today as a hundred years ago. That must translate to a difference in our body chemistry. Culturally, sweets have become more of an entitlement than a treat, knocking sugar off its traditional pedestal.

In my childhood, Halloween was one of the few magical times of the year that I had my own stash of candy (the others being Easter and Camp-of-the-Woods). Like Charlie and his chocolate bar, I carefully rationed it to last all month. I would save chocolate chip bags just to smell the chocolate lingering on the inside; my siblings thought I was crazy. And then when I was older and could have all the candy I wanted, I gradually lost my taste for it. I still enjoy high quality chocolate and homemade desserts now and then, but I have a new appreciation for where sugar belongs.

Part of adopting a traditional diet includes giving sugar back the respect it deserves – keeping it in its natural forms like fruit and honey, obtaining the highest quality, using it to accent nourishing foods, and saving it for special occasions.

As the proverb says: “If you find honey, eat just enough— too much of it, and you will vomit.” Ancient wisdom at its best.

The Pot that Became the Soup

The quintessential October day: every kind of rain, blustery and grey, crisp with the smell of dry leaves and wood stoves. A day like this craves a hearty stew and the company of good friends.

The menu: spinach and mushroom empanadas, baby green salad with heirloom tomatoes and balsamic vinaigrette, whole wheat sourdough with bright yellow Amish butter, Argentinian beef stew in a pumpkin shell and apple crisp.

I accidentally left my trusty kitchen scale in Annapolis, and I might as well have left my right arm. That chrome beauty helped me survive two months – and countless sourdough experiments – without a single measuring cup.

On Friday, I prepared the sourdough sponge (1/2 cup whole wheat starter at 100% hydration, 1 ¼ cups water and 1 2/3 cups grains (about 2 ½ cups flour) and the empanada dough, which needs some tweaking. They both sat on the counter overnight to ferment while the beef stock simmered away in the crock pot.

Saturday morning, I got the sourdough going again with 1/3 cup grains (about ½ cup flour), two tablespoons each melted butter and honey, 1 ½ teaspoons sea salt, half a teaspoon baking soda and two teaspoons cumin. While it was rising, I chopped a pound each of spinach and crimini mushrooms for the empanada filling. I sauteed the mushrooms with butter, a shredded garlic clove and a pinch of salt, then transferred them to cold storage with the raw spinach and two ounces of shredded cave-aged Gruyere. Before the morning was out, I assembled the apple crisp and baked the sourdough.

In the afternoon I shaped and baked the empanadas, finished the stew and the salad while Stephen set the table.

Argentinian Beef Stew in a Pumpkin Shell

1 lb. organic beef bones
1 gallon filtered water
1 onion
3 ribs celery
2 carrots

Roughly chop vegetables and simmer together with the bones in crock pot on low heat for 12 to 24 hours. Stop here for a phenomenal homemade beef stock. Or strain, pick the meat from the bones and return it to the stew, and keep everything in the crock pot ready for the following additions.

5 onions, chopped
8 oz. dried Turkish apricots, finely diced
2 tsp. cumin
3 cloves garlic, shredded
Rest of celery bunch, diced
Rest of carrots (from 1-lb bag), diced
1 lb. nitrate-free sausage, shaped into marble-sized meatballs
28 oz. can San Marzano crushed tomatoes
1 lb. frozen corn
1 acorn squash, roasted and mashed
1 quart homemade chicken stock
Salt to taste
1 large pumpkin, seeded

About three hours before serving, chop the onions and saute with butter, apricots, garlic and cumin. Add to the crock pot with the celery and carrots and turn the setting to high. When they’re tender, add the sausage. In a separate bowl, combine the tomatoes, corn, squash and chicken stock. Add half of the tomato mixture to the stew and let it return to a simmer for about twenty minutes. Save the rest for the last step.

Having never made a pumpkin-shell soup before and seeing visions of a mushy shell spewing soup everywhere, I wanted to keep my pumpkin as firm as possible. Rub the outside of the pumpkin with olive oil and place it empty on a serving plate in a 325 F oven for about twenty minutes to warm up. Gently ladle the hot soup into the pumpkin shell, replace the lid, and keep it in the oven at 200 F while the guests enjoy the empanadas. This made a lot more stew than would fit in the pumpkin shell. Leftovers, of course, are a cook’s best friend.

The pumpkin stew had a complex sweetness from the apricots, tomatoes and corn that complemented the richness of the stock, sausage and vegetables. I was hoping that the cumin in the sourdough would accent the flavor of the pumpkin stew, but it wasn’t noticeable. Next time I’ll double the cumin in the bread and see if the flavor shows up.

After dinner, I peeled and chopped the pumpkin shell and returned it to the crock pot with about two cups of white wine, the other half of the tomato-corn-squash-stock mixture, water to cover, and left it to simmer overnight. In the morning I seasoned it with one grated dried chipotle pepper (divine!), curry powder and salt. Since we already had plenty of leftovers, I popped all three quarts of this pumpkin soup into the freezer for a rainy day.

Ogi Cakes

This morning I made my first ever fermented millet hotcakes. Millet is a cous-cous-sized seed originally cultivated in northern China. It is 11% protein by weight, gluten free, and provides folate, niacin, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, calcium, selenium, zinc, and iron.

Starting on Sunday, I soaked the whole millet kernels in water and whey. Monday night, I strained and ground the millet to a paste in the food processor. Then I added more water and whey and let it sit overnight to ferment. Tuesday morning, I mixed together about two tablespoons of the now-bubbly millet with a tablespoon of organic creamline yogurt, an egg and a pinch of salt, and fried it in two batches in Amish butter. The cakes were surprisingly light, fluffy, bright yellow and crisp. Hard to believe they were whole grain! I spread them with raw honey to get the enzymes to break down the carbohydrates in the millet. Then I sauteed some shredded chicken (baked last night two hours at 350 F, stuffed with lemon, onion, garlic and ginger) with a teaspoon of Kaeng Par curry paste and two tablespoons of whole coconut milk. This chicken, some fresh yogurt and half a diced avocado topped off the honeyed millet cakes. Sour, sweet, spicy, creamy, and very filling. I could have used a little more salt to wake up all of the flavors, but a breakfast like this could wake me up any day.

Squirreling

The cashews and walnuts have dried, the macadamias are in the dehydrator, the Brazil nuts and almonds are soaking and the chestnuts are waiting in the freezer. Are we nuts?

Soaking and drying nuts is an old trick that makes them easier to digest. Nuts and other seeds naturally contain enzyme inhibitors to protect them from predators until they're ready to sprout. In our bodies, these enzyme inhibitors go to war against our own digestive enzymes. This puts a strain on our digestion, keeps us from getting the most nutrition from the nuts, and can lead to other enzyme-abuse-related health problems.

The general method is to cover the nuts in filtered water with about a tablespoon of sea salt per pound of nuts. They should soak about 12 hours, with the exception of cashews and almonds, which are already cooked even if they’re labeled raw. Don't soak these for more than 7 hours or they'll get soggy. After that, the object of the game is to dry the nuts on as low a temperature as possible to achieve crispy perfection within 24 hours. Lower temperatures preserve more of the nuts’ good enzymes, which start dying off at 118 F and give up altogether at 180 F.

Walnuts, pecans and almonds will dry quickly on the lowest heat, 115 F. Peanuts and Brazil nuts go for 135 F. Macadamias are the most stubborn of all, but I finally got them to cooperate at 145 F. Cashews are already cooked and don't have any enzymes to lose, so oven-roasting them at 200 F brings out a rich roasted flavor. Chestnuts don’t need to be soaked, just scored and oven-roasted until they pop. If you don’t have a dehydrator, all of these nuts dry beautifully on the lowest setting of your oven. The higher temperature (around 150 F) deepens the flavors and still saves some enzymes, so you get the best of both worlds. When the nuts are crispy, send them straight to the freezer so their delicious oils don't turn rancid.

Since nuts grow in shells and on trees with deep roots, I’m usually not picky about buying organic. My one exception is for the peanut (technically not a nut), because in America it’s often grown rotationally with cotton, a heavily sprayed crop. American peanuts can also contain high levels of carcinogenic aflatoxins. I am currently waiting to receive my first pound of organic, aflatoxin-free Jungle Peanuts. Since mandatory pasteurization went into effect, really raw almonds are only available straight from the farm.

Nuts are a perfect snack, packed with vitamins, minerals and a satisfying combination of carbohydrates, fats and protein. Give soaking a try - your enzymes will thank you.

A Rabbit in Every Pot

Tonight I made my first rabbit curry. Stephen and I acquired our eco-friendly rabbit at the Arlington Farmer's market last Saturday from a farm I deeply admire. Rabbit is remarkably like chicken, only with more bones in unexpected places. So I roasted it like a chicken on a bed of diced butternut squash, celery, onions, and carrots. I smothered it in a sauce based on my mom's honey-baked chicken recipe: 1/3 cup butter, 1/3 cup honey, 1/4 cup Dijon mustard and a heaping tablespoon of Kaeng Par curry paste. I poured a 14 oz. can of whole coconut milk and a sprinkle of salt over the whole dish. In it went to a 225 Fahrenheit oven for an hour and a half, then up to about 375 for the last half hour. I say 'about' because my oven seems to run about 75 degrees hotter than the dial says. Stephen and I ate it with our fingers and whole wheat sourdough flatbreads.

The flatbread was an all-day experiment. I tried two different Naan recipes with my two starters (grape juice and grain), and liked this rendition best:

1 cup (8 oz) Carl Griffith's starter, fed on equal weights whole wheat flour and water
2 cups (8 oz) Kamut flour
1/4 (2 oz) cup yogurt (organic grass-fed creamline)
2 T (1 oz) melted butter (organic grass-fed bright yellow and Amish!)
1 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp honey
1/4 tsp baking soda

Knead everything together, cover and leave it alone. I kneaded some more water into the dough after 4 hours because it felt too stiff. After another 6 hours, I pinched off a little walnut-sized ball, flattened it as thinly as possible with my fingers, then spread it on a greased cutting board to rest another 15 minutes. Then I melted some butter and bacon drippings in a smoking hot, wimpy hotel frying pan. Cakes went into the pan, covered, 30 seconds on each side. Hotel room filled with smoke. Panicked, turned down heat, turned on hood, realized fan didn't work, opened window and door. Smoke cleared up in time for dinner.

These cakes were tougher than the Naan served at Indian restaurants, but still fun to eat with and delicious with the curry sauce. This recipe would make a good pizza dough. It was more workable than the other recipe, but the finished bread was tougher. Further investigation is in order.

Bread experiments always throw me off. I had my money on the grape starter because it had the most dough-like consistency at first, but when they came off the skillet, it wasn't as fine-tasting-and-textured as Carl's starter. It was also disturbingly purple and had a faint grape flavor. Now the other recipe looked like mud from start to finish. It looked so unusable that I almost threw it out, but in the end I spread it out on the flimsy hotel broiler pan and left it for about half an hour. It rose beautifully. Then I baked it at 225 another twenty minutes or so. It puffed even more in the oven and came out looking and tasting like a fluffy biscuit - so buttery and soft it blew me away. This recipe, too, is a keeper:

1/2 cup (4 oz) starter
3 cups (12 oz) spelt flour
1/2 cup (4 oz) yogurt
4 T melted butter
1 tsp sea salt
2 tsp honey
1 tsp baking soda

I have searched high and low for a whole grain sourdough pizza dough. My usual sourdoughs are too soft and sticky to shape, so everything comes out shaped like the loaf pan. Both of these recipes have great potential for non-loaf applications - pizza, focaccia, bread sticks, pretzels, cinnamon buns, doughnuts, pastries, biscuits - so many possibilities! I can't wait to experiment.

One valuable conclusion from these experiments is that Carl Griffith's starter has superior rising power. In both recipes, with both doughs rolled side by side, Carl's rose almost twice as high - and tasted better to boot. This was a surprise, as I'd been under the impression that the yeast from fermented grapes would produce a lighter loaf than sourdough.

I also learned that the best learning experiences happen when I think I have nothing to lose. For the second recipe, it looked so useless that I was about to throw it out were it not for a little voice in my head saying - "just see what happens if you shape it and bake it now." It's when the dough looks good and I don't want to touch it for fear it won't rise again - that's when I don't learn a darn thing.

Last but not least, if you haven't forgotten our rabbit adventure, the most satisfying part of roasting a bone-in critter is tossing all those mineral-rich bones and joints into the stock pot to simmer overnight and wake up to a hotel room smelling divinely unlike any other in the United States.

A loaf of bread, a glass of wine…combined

Yesterday I made my very first loaf of bread from fermented grapes. The tradition of leavening bread with fermented fruits and grains dates back over five thousand years to ancient Egypt, where bread, wine and beer were prepared under the same roof. Bread and alcohol have been the closest companions ever since.

Unlike my early attempts at grain-based sourdough, this one was surprisingly foolproof. I can’t count how many bricks I’ve turned out in the past. This loaf didn’t rise above the lip of the bread pan, but I’ve never achieved that with whole grain. And what’s life without something more to work towards?

For the starter:
2 cups unwashed organic seedless grapes
3 cups rye flour
3 cups filtered water
4 days

For the loaf:
17 oz. starter
12 oz. freshly ground whole wheat flour
6 oz. filtered water
1 T Celtic sea salt
12 hours

Day 1 (Friday): I pureed two cups of unwashed organic Concord grapes in the food processor, then spent the rest of the afternoon picking out the seeds. I don’t know what I was thinking; use seedless grapes. Be sure they’re organic, since the yeasts live on the skins of the grapes, and you don’t want them bringing any pesticides with them!

To the grape pulp, I mixed in a cup each of rye flour and water and left it alone. Each of the next two days, I added another cup each of rye flour and water and moved the starter to a clean bowl – always at room temperature. By Day 4 (Monday) it was very frothy and smelled a bit like wine, only more astringent and grapey.

Tuesday morning at 6 AM, I mixed 17 oz. starter with 12 oz. freshly ground whole wheat, a tablespoon of sea salt and 7 oz. water. I should have used 6 oz. water, but I’d forgotten I halved the recipe when I measured it, and didn’t realize my mistake until mid-pour when the dough was looking awfully wet. I mashed it with my hands for a minute or two until I felt a little stiffness from the gluten, then balled it up and flopped it in a greased loaf pan. Arrived fifteen minutes late for work.

Tuesday evening, the loaf had at least doubled in size and went in the 300-degree oven at 5:53 PM. After 40 minutes, the edges had pulled away from the pan and it sounded hollow when thumped, and that was ready enough for me. I will have to check my real oven temperature because this hotel oven seems to cook things in half the listed time.

I waited about an hour to slice it. Surprisingly, it did not taste like grapes. I brought it in to work today, and my officemates actually liked it. They said it wasn’t grainy and heavy like most whole grain breads, but soft like white French bread! I was floored.

This is my new favorite bread recipe because I can make it on a work day. It is so low-maintenance, it’s better than my crock pot.

I have many alterations in mind for this supernaturally cooperative recipe. I would like to see how it deals with multiple rises, different liquids, other grains, fats, eggs, and crust variations.
I’m also curious about how it will change as the grape content in the starter gets replaced by flour. Theoretically, the yeasts have already come off the grape skins and multiplied to their hearts’ content in the flour, so there should be no difference in activity. I wonder how the flavor will change with age. For a five-thousand-year-old tradition, there’s plenty more for me to learn about sourdough.

Moving forward by looking back

It started with a grain mill. I remember my mom’s electric grain mill running in the garage when I was growing up. The whole wheat berries went into the square hopper on top and fresh flour came out of a little drawer on the bottom. The flour went into our Saturday morning pancakes, cooked four at a time on an electric skillet with real butter.

Fifteen years later, while perusing Kitchenaid stand mixer attachments for our wedding registry, I saw one of them was a grain mill. I remembered hearing that flour products made with freshly ground whole grains are just as fluffy as their nutritionally stripped white counterparts, so I scoured the internet for reviews and prices on grain mills from here to Germany. Thanks to the Garbanzo Bean episode of Iron Chef America and the detailed analysis of a Michiganian food blogger named Brian Glass, I chose the Komo Fidibus 21. It is a thing of beauty, housed in beechwood with corundum stones and an industrial motor.

Brian Glass also mentioned two books that revolutionized the way I think about food: Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price and Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. These brought me to www.westonaprice.org, a phenomenal resource for traditional nutrition and health.

Here’s the phenomenon: in the 1920s, Dr. Weston Price observed that modern Americans were crumbling physically compared to stone-age peoples around the world. From the Arctic to Africa, Dr. Price analyzed the nutrition and physical condition of isolated groups still living by millenia-old traditions. He documented one example after another of beautiful, physically excellent groups that crumbled (in the same patterns as modern Americans) when they left their native foods for “the displacing foods of modern commerce:” refined flour, sugar, jams, and canned foods. From observing and interacting with a range of diets at home and abroad, Dr. Price concluded that nearly all deviations from physical excellence – even those commonly considered genetic – are caused by nutritional deficiency.

Our bodies require sound building materials to be strong. Much of what modern Americans consider “food” is nutritionally empty; most nutrients in the raw materials are stripped away or destroyed during the manufacturing process. The more processed foods Americans eat (ten thousand new products hit supermarket shelves every year) the less healthy we get. Heart disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes have skyrocketed in the last century and are striking younger and younger. Children are born with narrower bone structures and crowded, crooked teeth; this is the first outward sign that Dr. Price observed among traditional cultures adopting empty foods.

Is our health a fair price to pay for convenience?

Traditional cooking is about preparing nutrient-dense foods in ways that help our bodies absorb the most nutrients possible. It frequently involves long, slow soaking, fermenting, sprouting, roasting and simmering. Unpopular foods like liver and fish, rich with vitamins and minerals, find themselves in the spotlight. Traditional cooking requires a great deal more attention and practice than your average freezer dinner. Fear not: balancing nutrition, taste, and a full-time job is not impossible! On the contrary, the extra nutrition gives one the energy needed to continue the traditional lifestyle.

When I started exploring traditional food preparation, my cooking faced a real crisis. Stephen had to endure many a failed experiment. I felt like I was five years old again, making my first gluey cake from scratch. Almost a year into my journey, I would like to share with you my learning experiences. I’m still wrestling with the principles of human nourishment, but making progress every day. This blog is dedicated to reviving ancient wisdom in a modern kitchen.

Bon Appetito!