Sour Dough and Whole Grains

Grain....The closer to whole the better? Well some people really have a hard time eating whole grains. For hundreds of years people only ate their grain fermented, sprouted, or soaked. It's only been in the last 100 years that we've used quick rise yeast and stopped soaking our grains.

While many of my treat recipes have un-soaked grains, we only eat these one or twice a week. Our main grains that we eat are fermented, sprouted or soaked. Why? Well to protect itself from bugs, the grain forms phytic acid on the outer shell when it dries. This acid is very hard for us to digest. If you soak or ferment the grain, it neutralizes the phytic acid and releases the nutrition and it is much easier to digest. This goes for nuts and legumes also.

For a better and longer explanation go here:
http://www.westonaprice.org/foodfeatures/be_kind.html

So our main bread we eat is sour dough bread. I have a start made from natural yeast from grapes. It's slower then the yeast most people use but it is much better for you. It's like a family member. I feed it once a week and it helps keep us healthy : ) This bread isn't really a good sandwich bread like you're use to : ) It's very dense and filling and when you get use to it very good. We just use one slice and put our sandwich goods on top of that. You can make many things with this dough. Our favorites are scones, pizza, Navajo tacos, pancakes, and crackers. I can't give you my recipe because it has a copy right on it but here is where I got my start and learned to make it. http://purebreadsourdough.com/zen/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=3 Gwen lives close to me and has been very inspiring. She has a great DVD out showing how to make these great many things with the dough. I highly recommend buying it. (no I don't get paid to say that).

Patrick also soaks all our breakfast grains, including oatmeal, pancakes, 9 grain, etc. I'll have him post his recipes. When you soak you need to use a sour dough start, lemons, kefir, yogurt, or apple cider vinegar. These brake down the phytic acid. It depends on what we're soaking to what we use to break down the acid. This all may seem overwhelming (and it is at first) but soon it becomes second nature.

Here's the dough after fermenting for about 6 hours. It still needs about 2 more hours. It will get pretty big and bubbly.

Here's the pizza crust we make with it. You put olive oil on the bottom and spread the dough all out and put oil on top with some oregano. You always have to keep your hands wet when you work with sour dough.

Our neighbor brought us over some beautiful peppers of every color (thanks Debany!!) and we put them on the pizza along with our goat cheese....YUM!!

Here are some scones cooked in coconut oil. These really needed a little more time for the dough to ferment but we were having scones with dinner and didn't want to wait until 9:00. If you wait until it's ready they get really fluffy and are so good. If you add honey butter it's better then any kind of sugar treat you could eat.

Here are the bread loaves. Not what most people are use to but exactly what they looked like when people used a sour dough start and cooked in an outdoor stone oven.