Let’s start the journey to being intuitive with sourdough; goldenrod; and links!
The goldenrod is nicely in flower here in Massachusetts. I highly recommend you get yourself some bunches for drying.
It's a joyful wildflower that brings calm and happiness! If you're further north, you may still find some in protected places where the colder nights haven't nipped it. If you're south of here, keep your eye out! (The grapes are from vines gone wild in my neighbor's yard, spotted at the end of my walk. Usually the birds get them long before I even see them!)
When it is dry, you can store the leaves and flower heads in a jar. Make a tea when anyone needs an immune-system boost, has the warnings of a UTI, seems a bit down, or needs a warm cloth for a wound — soak the cloth in the tea and apply.
Just opening the jar and smelling the goldenrod gives you a boost!
If you're feeling overwhelmed by cherry tomatoes, I find that cutting them in half and drying them for storage is a good way to deal with the surplus.
Little by little, you can fill a few jars — later in winter you will be so happy to be able to toss some in a salad instead of dried cranberries (no added sugar, either), or into sauce or soup for a tomato boost.
If you don't have a dehydrator (mine is from a yard sale, got it for $5), set your oven on its “proofing” setting or however low it will go and dry them that way. When you are drying, you have to stir them around, removing the truly dry ones and letting the others continue. It's not a binary thing like baking.
Sourdough CornerI hope your starter has… started!
I am an intuitive bread baker.
I could come on here and tell you not to worry about following recipes (especially when you ask me for my recipes, which are… non-existent) but it would be brutally unfair to you — and to me!
Because the truth is that I followed recipes for about 10 years — about 45 years ago. I made loaf after loaf over and over again until the recipes became part of my muscle memory.
I know how to bake bread without a recipe because I spent years in training with recipes tested by people whose job it was to test them.
I paid close attention to each recipe until I realized that flour, water, and salt would produce a rustic, chewy loaf, and the addition of milk especially, but also butter (or oil), sugar (or other sweetener), and even egg would result in a soft, tender loaf.
I pored over charts explaining the function of each ingredient. I learned what the proportion of “extra” ingredients such as cooked cereals (like cornmeal, oats, and coarser wheat grinds) could be added before the gluten of the base flour was compromised.
On many an occasion, I forgot to add the salt and figured out what the salt does. (Don't leave out the salt! In fact, add a bit more than the recipe calls for.)
{My pizza is always ready… when the sun has gone down. Sorry for the bad lighting! This is the best pizza I have ever made, made it last night: sourdough crust, chopped tomatoes from the garden, mozzarella, ricotta, parmesan, sweet yellow peppers and fresh purple basil also from the garden. Cracked the code on my new gas range and got the tenderest, crispiest crust. Trust me, I will work on providing you with the method!}
I made thousands of dinner rolls and countless pizzas. It all got critiqued by my little munchkins and then I strove to match their visions of even softer rolls and even crispier pizza crusts.
So when you got into this sourdough thing with me, you maybe didn't quite realize that I would make you do something like that as well. I went through it, and emerged a good baker, but the intuition means I'm not good at offering recipes!
I can tell you, though, that if, now that you have your starter, you follow some good recipes and try to learn from. your mistakes as I did, I will show you two things:
To maintain your starter without discarding!To make big batches of bread/rolls/pizza or anything else!
So this week, in the project of making you an intuitive baker as well, and assuming you have a nice strong starter, may I suggest that you practice by making this King Arthur recipe for two loaves of sourdough sandwich bread.
I encourage you to make sandwich bread to start with because the extra ingredients — milk, butter, and sugar — mean you don't have to do stretch-and-folds or otherwise baby your dough. Just keep it warm.
TIPS:
See the tips below regarding the starter/levain.You can use milk in place of the water if you don't have milk powder. You can use oil in place of the butter and honey in place of the sugar.After you mix the ingredients together, let the dough rest for 1/2 an hour before proceeding with the rest of the recipe.Go by the rising, not by the timing. LOOK at the dough, not the clock. It should look a bit puffy and not dead-like.When you form your logs, gently pat or roll each piece of dough out to make a flattened, thick rectangle. Then roll it up and seal the seam. (Later in the week when you do it again, you can braid the loaves according to my tutorial.)
Here are more tips for reaching that first goal of not discarding any starter:
I'm going to assume you have about a cup of starter in your jar.
Where it says at the beginning of the recipe to make the levain (which is feeding your starter and getting the quantity needed for the loaves), use the amount of starter that will leave about 1/4 cup of starter in your jar.
In other words, take your measuring cup and put into it whatever amount results in you having a few tablespoons of starter left over.
It doesn't matter if it is or is not the 3 tablespoons called for in the recipe.
It can be a cup or 1/2 cup — if so, add the amount of flour and water necessary to bring it up to around 300 g total (the total given in the recipe when you add up the amounts). If you have a bit more than that, it's fine. If you have a lot more, measure out the amount they say and use the rest for pancakes for tomorrow as I laid out in last week's post.
The main, key learning here is to be left with about 1/4-1/3 cup of starter in your jar (about 100 ml).
The recipe will come out the same whether you have 275, 300, or 325 g of starter.
But you will have too much starter in your jar if you don't pay attention to how much you're leaving, because…
You need to feed the starter in your jar as you make your levain for the bread recipe.
So do that now.
Feed it about 1/3 cup flour (a mix with rye if you can) and 1/4 cup very warm water or whatever ends up being a similar volume of flour to what you have in there plus just enough water to make it into a stiff dough.
Then put the cover on, not tightly, and wash the outside of the jar with hot water (to clean it and warm it up — it's been in the fridge and the glass is cold).
Now leave both out — the levain for the recipe and the starter.
Proceed with the recipe (looking at my first set of tips again) and put the starter back in the fridge when it has doubled in volume but before it loses its nice dome.
By the way, this is my current situation due to all this starter talk:
We'll leave the second goal (making big batches) for when you've mastered your two sandwich loaves!
bits & piecesRob Marco did a long interview with me, being published in three parts. Here is the first part — you can click along to see the second, and I think the third will be published next week. I talk mainly about feminism and its terrible cost to our well being.
Leila Miller was kind enough to say:
Leila Marie Lawler gave the interview that I've been waiting for all my life. If you are a woman, read this. If you have a daughter, read this. If you even know a woman, read this!!!!
(Then, find your courage, and share this! You never know whose life you will be changing, and that will affect generations.)
I'm glad we're going into natural fermentation, because I really think our current bread situation is the contraception of bread — the fake pleasure of a thing without delivering the goods, without achieving its end, which in the case of bread is to nourish, to provide flourishing to the body and to point beyond itself to the Bread of Heaven.
I think I have told you about this Substack that sends you a passage from the Rule of St. Benedict every day, with light commentary. I was reading this entry about what the monks ought to eat.
The commentary on the amount of bread:
“A pound of bread” – this sees a very large amount to us today! But medieval bread was usually more rich in protein and nutrients than its modern equivalent and formed a large part of the diet of everyone, not just monks. Of course we don’t really know what a “pound” meant to St Benedict, as he didn’t leave us any detailed measures in his Rule. Dom Delatte, in his commentary on the Rule, tells us that the monks of Monte Cassino did preserve the measure and that it equates to 12 ounces. Be that as it may, I think most monks and nuns today would think eating that much bread per day was quite a lot.
You can see here what he means about “more rich”:
Have you ever tried a bread and water fast? It's really hard, if not impossible, on bread made with yeast. I've been thinking about how the bread of the past must have been different from ours. It's unthinkable to me that active people — men who worked as well as prayed in the monastery — could survive on one meal a day plus bread, if they meant by that what we have.
But naturally fermented bread, when made with whole meal, is incredibly sustaining. My journey into it has revealed to me the difference. A piece of bread that you get in France or Germany from a good bakery or something like what I can now make at home is just not the same as anything you can buy or make with yeast.
I hope that encourages you to keep working at it!
A beautiful — stunning — reliquary representing the Exaltation of the Cross
The medieval year — the Ides of September
Next month will be held the conference on Blessed Karl of Austria in Washington, D.C. Phil will be speaking; I will be there! Our dear friend Paul Jernberg has written a Mass for the liturgy on Saturday. I hope you will be able to go!
Finally, some might be wondering why I call my new Substack The School for Housewives and not something like “for domesticity” or what have you, perhaps more appealing to those who are not married.
Partially my impulse is to startle. Who thinks of housewives today? Yet “housewife” is the exact counterpart of “husband” and the life of the married couple centers on their little domestic universe. There's a character in the book I'm currently re-reading (in its uncensored form, which I had not gotten to), In the First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who refuses to use “latinized” words but insists on only words with Russian roots. His obsession is to use language in the most realistic, elemental way possible as a sort of protest against the “foreign” Marxist tyranny that has actually imprisoned him.
I'm not that fanatical, but somehow “housewife” seems like a good bit of resistance to me.
Anyway, another reason is my delight in the School of Housewives in Iceland, which I learned about from watching this film: The School of Housewives: The Nordic school that creates the perfect housewife. I encourage you to watch it — watch it with your young people!
My thought with my Substack is to have a little something popping in your inbox every day that helps you love your little spot a bit more.
liturgical living
Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross
Next week the Ember Days are on Wednesday and Friday.
Here is my affiliate link to my Amazon page — the only affiliate thing that goes on here on LMLD, which is why the page loads quickly and you don’t have to keep closing pop-ups etc! Thank you for opening it and shopping if you are so minded — as some have asked me. If not, don’t worry one bit!
My book, The Summa Domestica: Order and Wonder in Family Life is available from Sophia Press! Also in paperback now! All the thoughts from this blog collected into three volumes, beautifully presented with illustrations from Deirdre, an index in each volume, and ribbons!
My “random thoughts no pictures” blog, Happy Despite Them has moved over to Substack! — receive it by email if you like, or bookmark, so you don’t miss a thing! The old one is still up if you want to look at the comments on past posts. It will take me a while to get things organized, but you'll be patient, I know!
There you will find the weekly podcast done by Phil and me, called On the Home Front. Do let us know what you think!
Visit me at The School for Housewives and recommend it to your young friends!
My podcast, The Home Truths Society, can be found on the Restoration of Christian Culture website (and you can find it where you listen to such things) — be sure to check out the other offerings there!
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