Capture the yeast within
June 5, 2007
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That’s a chopstick for stirring, not a straw for slurping.
My girlbud and twisted lifecoach K’tje has been baking bread for hoards of guests and is in desperate need of yeast. Fresh yeast. Down in Occitania it seems that many a masterbaker is in fact a boulanger truqué. Dang faker bakers don’t even have a proper block of yeast on the premises! K’tje asks if I’ll bring some on down next time I come by to water my garden. But considering the amount of yeast this girl piles through, it’s prolly better she learn how to make her own dang yeast.
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A few days on, evidence of the breath of life
This quote is from Allrecipes.com, used entirely without permission.
Wild Yeast and Starters
Before yeast was available in grocery stores, bakers kept colonies of yeast for making bread. These colonies were known as starters, and were sometimes passed on from generation to generation. You can make your own starter using commercial yeast, by using potato water (from boiled potatoes) to attract and feed wild yeasts present in the air around us, or by using the yeast found on the skins of organic grapes or organic raisins. Keep the starter in a one-quart crock, jar, or airtight container.
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Stir it up
How to capture a wild yeast
Mix equal amounts of flour and water and let sit in a warmish place. Indoors on top of the electric fridge is ideal. I mention electric fridge because some people I know are considering making one of those non-electric Nigerian pot-in-pot fridges. Those things are only for cooling, they’re incapable of warming up the environment and therfore unsuitable for growing yeast colonies.
In about a day you should start noticing signs of life (bubbles, maybe a slightly funky smell) give it a stir and add some more flour. Keep doing this for about a week, each day stirring and adding flour (and possibly some water, if it feels too dry to stir).
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The bubbles come from little yeasts breathing
At a certain point, you’ll have grown too much yeast colony because we’re not big on the carbs anymore and we don’t eat sourdough pancakes everyday. Common practice is to throw a bit of the beige gold away. Wasteful! Once you have baked with your own yeast and have some notion of its potency, there’s nothing stopping you from placing large blobs of it in decorative recycled jars and giving them to your friends as presents.
You know that I’m kidding, right?
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Feed them
Alternatively you can slow down the process by putting the colony in the fridge. Feed it once a week. When you want to use some, take out a blob plus some (because this stuff isn’t as strong as the industrial stuff) and re-animate it again by putting it in a warm spot (above the fridge) and feeding it for a day or two.
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If you can’t stop kneading beige things, yeast is so needy that it’s more like keeping a pet than leavening.
Making yeast starter links: They’re all from one website, because I really like the simplicity of these recipes the best. Plus, I’m suffering from CO2 information overload and don’t particularly want to hear about it in my yeast recipes as well. ‘Nuff said!
- yeast Basics
- Wild Grape starter for hippies
- Basic Sourdough Starter Recipe
- Sourdough II
- Amish Bread Starter for nerds
debra at 21:21 | Comments (4) | post to del.icio.us
Glutinous Maximus,
Grow yer own dang protein!
June 2, 2007
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It may be beige, but it sure is some good eatin’…
There are days when in one go, we can be inspired enough to shrug off one hella lotta ballast of preconceived notion. Last night was one of those days, when in an ad hoc workshop at the cooking studio of Marlein and Inez, Tomoko taught us to extract wheat gluten from flour and how to make seitan.
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Seitan’s realm, clockwise from 9 o’clock: gluten loogie, steamed & marinated seitan in a bun, knife, steamed & fried but not marinated, simply steamed, steamed & fried, steamed & marinated & fried (my favourite).
Preconceived notion #1: Without even investigating, I had always assumed seitan to be a highly processed food, akin to textured soy or textured vegetable protein, a prominent member of the subset, ‘food designed by mono-maniacal dictators trying to score a big one in the name of food sovereignty’.
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Flour power. As if wasting some precious wheat germ increases a carbon footprint, we used white flour for this daring experiment. Next time we’re goin’ brown.
Notion #1 debunked: Wheat gluten is a whole food, it already exists inside the wheat. You could argue that flour is processed wheat, but I would just argue back that you should just relax. The name seitan is a macrobiotic neologism invented by its founder in the 1960’s. Seitan refers to wheat gluten that has, by hook or by crook, been turned into something more satisfying than just another texture to put in your mouth and chew. To my knowledge (which is to say, to Google and Wikipedia’s knowledge) unlike many other proteinous foodstuffs, seitan has never been appropriated by a dictator to tow the party line. Soy, a well-known collaborator, cannot say the same.
To extract the gluten from flour, mix some flour and water into a sloppy, wet dough. Let it sit an hour or two in a slightly warm place.
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I knead you to knead me, I’m begging you to beg me.
After an hour or two, knead the wet dough for about 4 minutes and let it sit again for an hour. No need to be precise. Don’t be a follower, be a leader. I may be lying to you and I can’t follow an instruction to save my own life. It’s all about activating the gluten. (You know when you wash a bowl that has been filled with dough and all that clumpy doughy yucky stuff gets stuck in the metal wooly sponge-thingy and stays there for days making you not want to touch it? That’s gluten. You weren’t precise about it then, don’t be precise about it now.)
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It’s sexy, it’s gross, massaging out all that starch
Preconceived notion #2: I thought that seitan was developed purely as a tummy-filling device by famine giddy monks suffering from high-altitude crop failure. And I thought seitan was a ‘faked you out’ sort of meat-substitute, and except for the starch, void of any nutritional value.
Notion #2 debunked: That’s just crazy talk. Turns out the technique for making wheat meat is indeed thousands of years old and was indeed invented by monks that may or may not smell of rancid yak butter, but seitan is in no way devoid of nutritional value. In fact, gram for gram, wheat gluten contains more protein than red meat and is only 1 percentage point shy of cheese! Pass the cheese please, and by cheese, you know I’m talkin’ ’bout Seitan.
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After the starch has been massaged out and rinsed away, 25% of the mass is revealed to be gluten
Preconceived notion #3: Without even bothering to try it, I thought that seitan was disgusting, void of flavour, rubbery in texture, akin to spent chewing gum.
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Notion #3 debunked: This notion isn’t entirely untrue. In its lonesome, cooked wheat gluten is about as appealing as a plain boiled potato or boiled white rice. But like these foods, its popularity isn’t based upon how it behaves in its plain form. Nothing wrong with a bit of enhancement. Hell, I don’t unleash my ‘whole, natural self’ upon the world. I wouldn’t think of leaving the house without a big splash of perfume, some heels, a bra, and some profile flattering clothing. (And by profile, I mean tochas.) Same goes for wheat gluten, it wants to be infused with aroma and gussied up, marinated in a bath of kombu (seaweed), ginger, nama shoyu with a mushroom or two thrown in for good measure.
Zillions of pasta shapes have been designed into popularity according to how they absorb and ‘carry’ sauces. Like pasta, wheat gluten is a facilitator, ever willing to absorb accompanying flavours. If you prepare the wheat gluten by yourself, you can exert a lot of control over its texture. More on this in a subsequent entry, I’m still learning.
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It looks like a matza ball, but it isn’t. It’s better. Let me be the first to assert that wheat gluten is better than a matza ball.
Store the extracted wheat gluten for up to 3 days in the fridge in some water while you learn how to transform it into the opposite of what it is right now. Buddhist much?
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Closeup of steamed and fried seitan
That’s 3 myths debunked. Here are some links, now go make yer own dang protein…
- Bunshiro Fu - famous makers of pretty fu. Fu’s another word for wheat gluten.
- Futomi Yokoyama - manufacturers of fu, the other wheat gluten
- Hippy children in California exploring gluten
- Can you trust it? Wheat Gluten and Seitan on Wikipedia
- More iffy sources… Wheat gluten as food?
- Which leads us to Buddhist Cuisine… don’t go overboard
- A vegan body-builder and his vegan body-building diet explained at Vegetarian Teen (Seitanic praises for this magnificent website!)
- In Dutch unfortch:
Comparison of protein (1st %) and fat (2nd %) per 100 gram in common proteinous foods:cheese 25,5% 29%
seitan 24% 0%
lean beef 22% 20%
fish 17,7% 12%
flour 11,7% 02%
tempeh 17% 07%
tofu 11,2% 06,6%
debra at 13:12 | Comments (6) | post to del.icio.us
Edible Estates breaking ground in London
May 26, 2007
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Butternut squash and nasturtiums about to go vertical
Looking to get your hands dirty in London this weekend? Edible estate agent Fritz Haeg will be breaking ground on his 4th edible estate, this time in collaboration with the Bankside Open Spaces Trust (BOST) and commissioned by the Tate Modern. Haeg will work with the families in an inner city London housing block converting the public lawn in front of their building into a productive landscape of vegetables, fruits, herbs and grains.
Considering how the Brits love their lawns, this is truly groundbreaking. Haeg has been been raising awareness in the US about the footprint the suburban lawn, and with this project he’ll be tackling the nature of this public urban space in London.
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Calabash and nasturtiums in a domestic setting
The planting will take place this weekend (May 25-27) and you can either email Fritz (fritz at fritzhaeg.com) or simply show up at the corner of Lancaster St. & Webber St. in Southwark, near the Borough, Southwark & Waterloo tube stations if you want to participate. I’m imagining it will be an all-hands-on deck sort of thing and probably Madonna and family will be there, but I’m not completely sure. What is certain is that the champions of productive urban landscapes, André Viljoen, Katrin Bohn cum sui (Bohn & Viljoen Architects) will all be rolling up their shirtsleeves on Sunday. Guess there’s no time like the present to rub elbows with the elbow greasers.
In solidarity of the Edible Estate planting, I’ll be spending the weekend encouraging my own indoor kitchen garden squash to grow upwards and going ’round the neighbourhood stealing ladybugs to gift to my windowsill sunflowers. The sunflowers have been blighted by a herd of aphids and the organic soap I used as a pesticide had absolutely no effect in stemming the scourge.
Because this is my first time growing plants in containers, I’ve completely underestimated the amount of real estate needed by each plant. Now that the squash are starting to take off it’s really obvious, a phenomenon that is camouflaged in an outdoor garden. I’m now training the plants (all of which are enthusiastic climbers) to grow upwards and I expect that within a month’s time I’ll have ‘grown’ some privacy for my steady stream of houseguests languishing on the couch slash guestroom.
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Flower buds are already forming!
debra at 12:43 | Comments (1) | post to del.icio.us
